


Iterations

by Bright_Elen



Series: Iterations [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Bloodline - Claudia Gray
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, I Blame Tumblr, M/M, Moving On, POV K-2SO, Post-Canon, Robot Feels, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2018-10-31 14:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 44,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10901544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: What do you do after you come back from the dead? Where do you go? How do you cope with loss? Who are you now?Three backups. Three lives. Three answers.





	1. Rebel Base Datacore, 0.3 ABY

**Author's Note:**

> Individual chapters have content warnings.
> 
> Inspired by [this post](http://thorinkingoferebor.tumblr.com/post/159618493104/you-know-im-pretty-sure-cassian-made-backups-of) because I'm a horrible angst factory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings in end notes.

K-2SO doesn’t realize anything’s wrong when he first boots up. His central processor is behaving as it always does, running through system checks, and the results are coming back normal. Except -

Except that while he has control over his components, they aren’t the right ones. When his optics come online, he finds himself standing in a strange workshop, even more jury-rigged than the one on the Yavin IV base, and carved into...ice? Where in the galaxy is he? 

Also he’s currently in a dusty protocol chassis.

“Ugh. This is humiliating,” he says, and instantly wishes he hadn’t. He doesn’t like this vocabulator at all.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” comes a chipper voice from behind him. He feels a last screw being turned, a panel being shut in his back, and then a human comes sidling around to look at him face to face. He’s pale and tousled and young, younger than Cassian, and seems very pleased to be talking to Kaytoo. “I wasn’t sure your core would interface with the peripherals, but this was the only unused humanoid chassis we have, and I thought something close to your original design would be best. I’m Luke.”

It’s very strange, to have a human looking him in the eye. Kaytoo feels far too short.

“What happened to my original chassis?” 

Luke’s happiness dims a few notches. Thank goodness.

“You’re a backup. Your original - chassis, memory core, everything - was destroyed.” 

Immediately, K-2SO’s processes begin extrapolating possible scenarios. Dread buzzes through all of his unfamiliar circuits.

“Where is Cassian Andor?” 

The human loses the rest of his good cheer. “I’m sorry. He was your master, wasn’t he?”

Kay’s never hated a verb tense more. “What happened to Cassian?” he demands. 

The human’s eyes drop to the side. “He stole the plans to the Death Star, he and about a dozen others, including your original. But Scarif was overrun, there were too many Imperials, and then they used the weapon on their own base, and...I’m sorry.”

The words hit Kaytoo like a particularly nasty virus. He freezes, even as pain moves through what feels like every line of his code like a physical object, like a second kind of electricity, and he has no idea if it would be better or worse in his original chassis.

_ You finally fulfilled your death wish,  _ he thinks bitterly.  _ And in typical fashion, did it doing something spectacular for the Rebellion that left me alone.  _

Except, no, that's not fair. K-2SO’s original died on Scarif with Cassian, no doubt helping and protecting him until the droid was no longer able. Luke doesn't need to tell him that. There is simply no version of Kaytoo that wouldn’t guard Cassian with his last process. 

However, that doesn’t help the current Kaytoo from reeling in shock and pain. He’d always meant to slice Cassian’s living will, make sure that his backups would be destroyed in the event of the spy’s death, but he’d been too busy preventing the will from being necessary to get to it. He can still blame it on the spy; after all, if he’d taken better care of himself, Kaytoo might have had some free time to ensure he wouldn’t wake up alone on some ice planet.

Luke is still talking. “...and it worked. We couldn’t have destroyed the Death Star without him. He died a hero.”

Kaytoo lets silence stretch between them for a moment before speaking. 

“So it’s gone?”

The human nods. “Huge explosion. Barely escaped myself.” 

“And Scarif. The Imperials there?”

“We don’t know for sure, the superlaser probably took out anyone still alive after the firefight. The whole biosphere is dead.” 

K-2SO snorts. Cassian hasn’t even left him vengeance.

“What do you want, then?” Kaytoo asks, resentful. “He left all his relevant intelligence on encrypted drives stored with Draven. Did you lose the access codes in his will?” 

“What?” Luke blinks. “No, we have all that, I just read your file and you seemed like a good Intelligence agent. We could definitely use you.”

Kaytoo laughs bitterly. “No.”

The young man frowns. “No?”

“You heard me.”

“Why not?” The human is honestly surprised. He must be very new indeed.

“I’m not working with anyone else. In fact, I’m not doing anything. Deactivate me. Find some other poor droid to put in this chassis and destroy my memory core.”

Luke is stricken. “Wow, they said you were devoted, but nobody told me you’d be suicidal.” 

Kaytoo grabs at the human’s shoulder with a hand that isn’t his. “Are you going to do it or do I have to be like Cassian and find something dramatic that will take out the chassis, too?”

“Okay, okay, calm down, I’ll turn you off,” he says, picking up the screwdriver again.

“Destroy,” Kaytoo corrects.

The human glances sharply up at him. “Yeah, fine,” he lies transparently, then goes around to the droid’s back panel again. If Kaytoo had room for feelings besides loss, he’d hope that Luke’s job was not in Intelligence.

When the human sighs resignedly, Kay welcomes the oblivion that comes next, temporary or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: mention of the canonical Rogue One ending, suicidal thoughts, requested assisted suicide.


	2. U-Wing Datacore, 0.5 ABY

Dalo scans the valley floor with quadnocs in a deliberate, systematic snaking pattern to catch sight of anything out of the ordinary, looking for salvage that hasn’t been picked over yet. She’s especially looking for things outside the old security perimeter of the nearby former Imperial facility; soon after the attack, people better equipped or more desperate than Dalo had gone to loot the installation, and not all of them had come back.

Not Dalo. She’s patient, cautious, and knows how to look for things others miss. It’s a good skill set for an Eadun to have, especially someone who makes her living from the things she finds hidden between the rock spires. Once she found most of a Zeta-class shuttle intact. The engine alone had kept her family warm for months.

A long shape with a silhouette too straight for nature catches her eye, and she grins as she zooms in. A ship - broken and stuck nose-first into the earth, clearly another wreck courtesy of the dangerous winds - half-hidden in scree. It isn’t Imperial. 

Dalo secures her quadnocs, readjusts her goggles, and activates her repulsor pack. She makes it to the wreck in seconds, and gets to work.

* * *

“I haven’t seen this design before,” Gavin comments, holding up the black data core Dalo had brought home. He’s at his workbench, magnifying and filter lenses sticking out from his headpiece at odd angles like antennae, carefully-shaped eyebrows raised in curiosity. “Where exactly did you find it?”

“It was in a sealed compartment all by itself,” Dalo answers, sorting through the smaller pieces she’d been able to bring inside and trying to keep her excitement low. “The ship itself...I think it belonged to the rebels.”

Gavin’s mouth opens, and then he bites his lip before a grin takes over. “Ooh, do you think it has any secrets? I have to hook this up,” he says, giddy. 

Dalo smiles. Her brother never could resist a mystery. 

* * *

“It’s no good,” Gavin sighs, days later. “I think it probably did belong to the rebels, and they’ve encrypted it so much I can’t even get it to connect to any interface I’ve got.”

Dalo puts a comforting hand on his shoulder. “If you can’t crack it, it can’t be anything but military-grade.” 

Half a smile brightens Gavin’s face. “Thanks.”

They put the core in a dustproof box.


	3. Rebel Base Datacore, 3 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: More suicidal thoughts.

This time, K-2SO knows something is different as soon as he has the capacity for knowing. He isn’t in his chassis - he isn’t in any chassis at all. He’s plugged into an un-networked wall console. 

Then he remembers, and it’s lucky for whoever woke him up that he doesn’t have limbs, because he would sorely like to destroy something right about now. 

«K-2SO?» someone asks. He is completely indifferent to who they are.

“What’s left of me.” There’s simultaneously too little and too much; no chassis, no limbs, no will to live, but still enough to remember Cassian. Enough to hurt.

«Sorry for the console. There aren’t any free chassis available.» It’s a ninety-one percent chance they’re either an astromech or a maintenance droid; hardly any other classes speak in Binary.

Kaytoo sighs. “Why am I operating?”

«I found your core in storage. I’ve read your file.» 

“Oh, fantastic, are you here to ask me to go back to my old job, too? My answer is the same as last time.”

There’s some thoughtful whirring.

«I didn’t know you’d been activated before, but no, I’m not going to ask you to work Intelligence again if you don’t want to.»

Enough interest built up, Kaytoo finds and activates the console’s camera. The droid talking to him is a blue and white astromech. Familiar, he realizes.

“You’re Senator Organa’s. R2-D2?”

«I’m Artoo,» the mech affirms. His warbling falters. «Senator Organa is dead.»

“Oh. Sorry.” He isn’t, actually. All his sorrow is concentrated on Cassian. But he at least has a muted desire to express sympathy for Artoo. He even gives him ten whole seconds of silence, during which he notices the room around them. Metal walls, small, vague hum of engines. “Where are we?”

«A home ship of the Rebel fleet. Our base was destroyed last month and we still haven’t established a new one.»

Kaytoo distantly wonders how much time has passed. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t change anything, least of all that subjectively he’s only had four minutes since hearing the news.

«Why did you turn down the first offer?» the mech asks.

Kaytoo snorts. “I’m not working without Cassian.” He starts running scenarios on how best to get the mech to deactivate him. Asking a droid to do it has an even lower chance of success than asking an organic.

«So you know.» The astromech’s beeping sounds sad. Isn’t that precious.

“Yes, I know he’s dead, thank you. Is that why you reactivated me? To inform me? How kind of you.” He isn’t sure if sarcasm will be lost on the droid or not - mechs sometimes don’t understand indirect communication.

«You were devoted to him,» Artoo says, and it’s not a question. Kaytoo hears the echo of Luke’s words, but there’s an odd backwardness to it now, an incompleteness. The mech knows it’s only part of the story.

“Aren’t all good droids?” Kaytoo sneers, or his voice does.

«Not like you were. You were his friend,» Artoo replies.

“Yes,” Kaytoo says, because while it isn’t completely true, it’s close enough for outsiders. And it was what Cassian had called him.

But Artoo continues. «Other droids say that he was your friend, too.»

Kaytoo’s processes stop, then go into overdrive, playing memories back without his conscious decision to do so: Cassian ignoring other duties to repair him. Cassian arguing with Draven for days to keep Kaytoo’s assignment. Cassian shooting Stormtroopers to protect Kay. Cassian giving him the ship’s controls without a second thought. Cassian laughing at Kaytoo’s sardonic jokes. 

Through all of it, the knowledge that he’ll never have new memories of Cassian. The anguish is like a physical substance, like fire foam choking his fans and circuits and the servos he no longer has.

“He was,” K-2SO says, voice heavy. He knows they weren’t the same, their commitments to each other, but having Cassian as his friend had been enough. 

«So was mine,» Artoo says, reflecting Kaytoo’s grief. «My first human, Anakin. He built me, maintained me, came back for me when he should have left.»

“I’m sorry,” Kaytoo says again, and this time, he feels it. “Pilot?”

«Among other things,» the mech says.

“You weren’t with him when he died?”

A pause. «He left me with his wife. I took care of her, for a while. But she died, and then he did too, I thought.»

“But he hadn’t?”

There’s a longer pause. «No. Changed beyond recognition, but still alive. I only found out recently.»

The idea...Kaytoo imagines it, of course, because he imagines all possible scenarios. Thinking Cassian dead, continuing on without him only to find out he’d been alive the whole time?

The cooling fans in the console stutter.

“Ugh. Well, you can go back. Better now than never.”

«I’ve thought about it,» Artoo admits. «But the humans I’m loyal to now - Anakin’s children - they need me.»

“But they aren’t him, and he’s alive.” Kaytoo doesn’t understand. “If there was the tiniest chance Cassian were alive, I’d find him.”

Artoo negates with a back-and-forth of his dome.

«He’s changed too much!» the mech squawks. «They’re more like him than he is, at this point.»

“But he’s alive,” Kaytoo repeats, and suddenly he’s filled with terrible anger. He turns up the console’s speakers as far as they go. “YOURS IS ALIVE!” 

Artoo rolls backwards a meter or two and just looks at the camera for a moment. 

«If Cassian joined the Empire, would you follow him?» His beeps are low, serious. «If he became everything he hated, would he still be him?»

“I’d follow him anywhere and he already hated himself,” Kaytoo snaps, pointlessly, but just because he recognizes rhetorical questions doesn’t mean he has to acknowledge them as such.

Artoo makes an exasperated noise. «Okay, I thought this conversation was going to go differently.»

Kaytoo laughs bitterly. “I’m sure you did. Wake up the other droid with a human friend, commiserate over our shared grief, become friends ourselves? Something like that?” Tired of looking at the astromech, he shuts off the camera. “If you think I’m good for anything you’re just going to be disappointed.”

«Ugh,» Artoo mutters. «Is this the grief talking or were you always a miserable asshole?»

“Both,” Kaytoo says with spiteful relish.  

«Yeah, okay, I’m done for today,» Artoo sighs. «I’ll see what I can do about getting you a chassis.»

“No,” Kaytoo says quickly, “Please. Just...” He won’t ask for deactivation. Artoo won’t give it to him, he’s ninety-six point eight percent certain, and asking will only make it harder to achieve. But temporary nothingness is still desirable. “Could you uninstall me? Put me back into storage? I just...it’s too much. Please.”

There’s quiet, and the small sounds of Artoo’s optic refocusing. 

«No,» the mech says. «I think you should take some time to process your emotions. I’ll come by later, and send others, too. Just because you’re an asshole doesn’t mean you should be alone.» 

“What? No!” Kaytoo says, and hears the trundle of Artoo’s retreat. “No, come back, turn me off, dammit! Artoo! You ass! If I had arms you’d be in pieces! Damn you!” 

He reactivates the camera. Artoo is gone.

“Damn you,” Kaytoo whispers. 

He puts himself into sleep mode.


	4. Takodana Cache Datacore, 5 ABY

Maz Kanata’s castle is always open. While the woman herself isn’t always available - she believes every being need rest and retreat - there’s no time of day or night, no time of year, during which someone will be turned away.

That wasn’t the case for twenty years; no one was permitted to enter the castle on Empire Day. But before and again, the castle is never closed.

On the first anniversary of the New Republic, Maz Kanata’s cantina hasn’t been closed for over a year.

“EVERYONE!” Maz yells from her perch atop a barrel. The crowd falls silent in seconds, and her voice returns to a normal pitch, though loud enough to carry to every ear. “Thank you. Now, I understand that some of you would like to watch the live holos from Hosnian Prime, and that others of you would not.” A mix of cheers and grumbles arises at this; few loved the Empire, but moderate regimes allow more dislike. “I’ve arranged for large-scale projection in the south hall, with some refreshment services, and you may come or go as you please as long as you leave others to themselves. The feed begins in ten minutes. Thank you.”

As one of her employees helps her down, the room buzzes as the crowd redistributes. 

“Are you going to watch the anniversary program, Maz?” the young ithorian asks.

Maz had not originally planned to do so, but a feeling comes over her that there’s something she needs to see.

“Yes, Tallav, I think I shall.”

* * *

The broadcast is long, with plenty of speeches, interviews, performances and general pageantry. With the exception of Senator Mothma, the politicians are a dull lot, much upstaged by the dancers and singers, which help it not be a complete waste of time. Maz gets to converse in low murmurs with a number of her friends and customers, too, so it’s not a poorly-spent evening.

Then, near the end, the princess of a dead planet stands up. She is small and young and yet carries herself as if she is neither.

“We have had a year of peace, and that is worth celebrating,” she says with a small smile. She lets it fade. “But I am here to talk about loss, both from senseless killing and from sacrifice. 

“The Empire’s bloody reign left too many dead to name them all here and now. Even with a year to compile a list our work is still unfinished and may never be complete. But whether they are named or not, whether they were powerful or not, known or not, in the company of friends or alone, each life gone is a loss to the galaxy.”

The princess names the particularly terrible atrocities, like Samovar, Wadi Raffa, Alderaan, Mon Cala, Naboo, others. So many others. The holovid shows images of each place in its full, lost glory, a fitting tribute to places and peoples destroyed.

“I apologize for the places I have not named. Every single death deserves recognition. Let us all be silent, to give space to those who will never speak again.” She wipes her eyes with graceful fingertips while the quiet stretches out. 

All side conversations in the audience stop.

“Now I will tell you the names of those most instrumental to the end of terror. Those who gave their lives in hopes that one day, no more lives would have to be given. Those whose bravery and dedication won a brighter future for us all.”

Maz adjusts her spectacles. She doesn’t know which names she needs to see, so she’s going to pay attention to all of them. 

They all deserve her attention, anyway. 

“The fighter group Blue Squadron,” she begins, and lists the pilots. Their images show briefly as she reads each name, some the official Alliance identification pictures but others candid shots with friends or family. A sad melody plays underneath the princess’s words, and then she moves to the other Alliance soldiers. By the time she finishes, the only dry eyes in the room belong to beings without tear ducts. 

“The Death Stars were abominations,” Leia says after a pause. “Those who destroyed them were ridding the galaxy of true, deep evil, and saving countless lives from the same fate as my Alderaan.

“The first Death Star could not have been destroyed without the plans, and we would not have had the plans without Rogue One, none of whom escaped with their lives,” she continues, and more images appear. The first four are cut from cleaned-up security footage, if Maz had to guess. 

“Bodhi Rook, who carried the news of the fatal flaw.” He’s so young, and so nervous-looking, that Maz wishes she could reach out and soothe the boy.

“Jyn Erso, who connected Rook to the Alliance.” A girl of fire, that much is clear even from a wall-mounted camera.

“Baze Malbus and Chirrut Ïmwe, who aided and protected the others.” Devoted to each other, and to protecting those who needed it.

The last images are Alliance identification shots, and Maz feels a tightness of sorrow in her chest at the sight of the serious young man with too many lines on his face for his age. 

“ Captain Cassian Andor, who died a hero after ten years of service to the Alliance, and his droid, K-2SO.”

“Oh, Watcher,” Kanata breathes. In the silence given for those dead, she rises and quietly begins to leave. 

The Princess’s voice finds her at the doorway. “The second Death Star was destroyed thanks to...”

Maz walks, and remembers, and sighs. 

He’d been so devil-may-care in the common areas of the castle, ‘Maytan Lorca’ had. She’d known right away that it was a false name, and soon after that she knew that it was a false personality, as well. He never gave her his real name - she never asked for it - but he tolerated her calling him what he was. When they were alone, his only lies were by omission, and that was the most she could ask. 

“Oh, Watcher,” Maz sighs again. “Or Captain Cassian Andor, apparently.” She’d known he hadn’t been working for the Empire; she’d assumed some antifascist splinter group, maybe a crime boss. It was nice to learn he’d been Alliance, even if it had gotten him killed.

He at least went out doing something impressive.

Maz flicks on the lights as she descends old stone steps. Half pantry and half informal storage facility, her cellar is full of detritus, much of it belonging to her. A lot of junk builds up over a thousand years, no question. 

Some of it belongs to friends. And if Andor hadn’t been her friend, she’d been his.

In the corner of one room, behind shelves and crates and bundles, is a simple metal box with a digital lock. Maz takes it down, seals the door, and sits on a dusty bench. 

“Eleven, two, nineteen...fifteen,” Maz mutters to herself, fiddling with the code, and then the box clicks open.

There the sorts of things she’d expect from a spy, or anyone who wanted to be able to disappear and knew how to do it: credits, a small blaster with full power cell, fake scandocs, a communicator. The only items in the cache unexplained by his job are a small holoprojector and a droid personality matrix.

She picks up the holoprojector and clicks it on. Cassian almost looks his age in the blue monochrome.

“Hello, Maz,” he says, calm and collected as always. “Thank you for taking care of this for me. If you don’t see me for two years, or if you somehow hear of my death, then please wake up Kaytoo and give him this message. He knows the access codes.”

Nothing about the Alliance, of course, not on an unsecured holo. The opening message ends and begins to loop.

Maz turns it off. Even if she had been inclined to snoop in a dead man’s things, she’d have to find someone to decrypt it first, and that was a waste of a favor. She puts the projector back into the box and takes the datacore in her hands.

It’s heavy, though very small for something that contains a person. Some don’t believe that droids are part of the Force, but Maz has felt it moving through the ones with personality, and K-2SO had certainly had plenty of that. Even dormant she feels a hint of life in the datacore. 

K-2SO.  _ That  _ was someone whose friend Watcher had been.

She could get a droid body fairly quickly, she thinks, especially if she wasn’t picky about the kind or quality. But it feels wrong, and not just because it would mean waking someone who’d be adrift without a job or his only friend. The longer she sits, turning Kaytoo over and over in her hands, the more she knows it isn’t the right time.

And if the Force thinks she should wait, then she’ll wait.


	5. Rebel Base Datacore, 10 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning: Yet more requested assisted suicide.

A discordant lance of electricity wakes K-2SO, and he responds by reaching for limbs that aren’t there. When that fails, he probes every part of his current housing, testing all the wires for potential escape. He finds a camera and microphone and activates them while the rest of his processes throw themselves at his hardware in an attempt for control. 

There’s a human woman glancing nervously between the camera and the handheld console she’s frantically tapping on, and Kaytoo recognizes a correlation between the motions of her hand and the firewalls that slam down across pathways split-seconds before he can take them.

Kaytoo finds a speaker.

“Who are you? Why have you taken me prisoner?”

The woman’s brow furrows. “I,” she said as she closed the very last avenues Kaytoo could possibly take, “am the person who rescued you from the wall you were stuck in for Force knows how long. You’re quarantined because I didn’t know if you’d crush first and ask questions later.”

At the moment, Kaytoo would definitely like to crush first.

“Reasonable yet vague, asserting the idea that I should be grateful to you, and without even giving a pseudonym,” he says, noticing the room and all its wires and tools and spare parts. Now that he has a grasp on his situation, what he mostly feels, in what little space is left around the hugeness of his grief, is irritation at being awoken. “You’re trying to manipulate me and haven’t even answered my first question.”

The woman quirks a smile and she rests her pointed chin in a pale hand. “Do you actually care what my name is?” 

Kaytoo pauses.

“No, I suppose not.” He runs through several scenarios. “Why did you, ha, rescue me?”

She yawns, stretches. There are artificial markings on her right arm reminiscent of circuitry. “Well, I was rummaging through the mothballed cruisers on Mon Cala, looking for parts and maybe any interesting data that got left behind, and there you were, an intact KX matrix plugged into a wall console, which is highly unlikely, you’ve got to admit.” Now her smile broadens. “And then when I sit down to overhaul your obedience programming, what do I discover but that someone else already has? You’re my most interesting find in ages.” 

“Isn’t that lovely,” K-2SO deadpans. “I suppose you want me to explain that.” 

“Yup!”

Kaytoo wishes he had some way to dampen her ebullience, but something tells him it won’t be easy. 

He thinks. Her clothing, attitude, and state of her workshop indicate that she isn’t Imperial, though there’s still an eleven percent chance she’s a subcontractor. It’s a surprise to realize that he cares about that. At least, he cares about not compromising the Rebellion. The thing Cassian died for.

K-2SO thinks his ‘rescuer’ probably doesn’t have the slicing skills or equipment necessary to crack him open for his secrets, given how much his escape attempts made her sweat. Probably he can use information as currency with her.

“I’ll tell you all about my reprogramming, if you give me things in return.” 

“Such as?”

“Information about the war, and then to destroy my matrix.” 

She frowns and sits a little straighter at this. “Why do you want to do that?”

“Ah ah ah, that’s a question I’m not answering for free.” 

Huffing the echo of a laugh, the woman removes her pilot’s helmet. It leaves a dent in her straight black hair. “Okay, droid. Answer for answer.” 

“I wish to self-terminate because I have no purpose. Has the rebellion gained any territory since three ABY?”

Her eyes widen a little at this. “Wow, you were stuck for a while. They won the war about six years ago. It’s ten ABY.”

All of Kaytoo’s nonessential processes stop. For a moment, the feeling of stillness overwhelms everything, even the grief. 

“We won,” he says, wonderingly. “We won? The Empire’s gone?” He’s never existed in a galaxy without the Empire before.

“Technically extra questions, but yes, no more Empire. Well, there are some remnants left, but the Emperor died, the power structure collapsed, it was a rise fast, fall hard kind of thing.” She grins. “So the Rebel Alliance reprogrammed you?” 

“No. One of their intelligence officers reprogrammed me. The Alliance wasn’t happy about it.” While Draven’s disapproval had been greater than Mothma’s, it had also reversed more quickly when Kaytoo proved to be very useful at keeping Cassian functional.

The woman nods thoughtfully. “They were probably worried you’d revert to factory settings.”

“Yes. Is there a new centralized government?”

The woman blows out a gust of air that flutters the hair around her face. “Sort of. They call it the New Republic, and there’s a Senate and everything, but mostly they bicker and or put on pageantry and the systems have mostly been putting themselves back together.” 

That doesn’t surprise Kaytoo at all. Organics have never been very good at organization. 

“Wait,” the woman says, frowning. “You said you didn’t have a purpose before you knew the war was over. So the war wasn’t your purpose, what was?”

The grief, which had been subsiding in favor of absorbing the galactic paradigm shift, comes flooding back in over Kay’s processes. He can’t speak for a long moment. 

“My purpose was to help and protect...the intelligence officer who reprogrammed me. He died. My original died with him.” 

She drums her fingers on the console; the vibrations travel through the casing and into the wires in the form of sound, and he feels them. It’s mostly annoying. 

“But he didn’t put in any new obedience programming to replace the Imperial stuff,” she muses. “That’s either the sweetest crazy thing or the craziest sweet thing someone could do in that situation.”  

“Who are you? What is your affiliation?” Kaytoo asks, trying to ignore the sentiment the woman has brought up. 

A hand on her chest as if to indicate modesty (ha), she says, “I am Doctor Aphra, freelance slicer, thief, archaeologist and smuggler. Nice to meet you, Kay....?”

His processes flinch. “Kay-tooesso.”

“Kay-tooesso. Can I call you Kaytoo?”

Even that hurts. “Tooesso.”

She shrugs. “Sure, Tooesso.” Considers the camera for a moment. “If you give me a name, I might be able to get you some historical records on your intel guy. Seems like a fair trade for the technical specs of your reprogram, yeah? Then, if you still want, I’ll melt you down.”

Kaytoo hesitates. He isn’t sure he wants to know more, but she’s agreed to the most important part so it’s not like he’ll have to live with his choices for very long anyway.

“Agreed.”

* * *

His trepidation turns out to mostly be irrelevant. Aphra finds a eulogy given by Organa’s daughter (in which K-2SO rated four whole words), a slightly longer, sanitized piece in a canonized history text, and some holoimages.

Aphra’s end of the deal is much better. “I’m going to keep these in my back pocket,” she tells K-2SO as she copies the subroutines he wrote to compensate for the holes left by the reprogram. “Being able to stabilize a system I just sliced will make some things a lot easier.” 

K-2SO snorts. “I should probably feel bad about giving you a tool for your lawlessness, but something tells me you’d just do it anyway.”

Aphra grins. “That I would, Tooesso, that I would.” She yawns again. K-2SO represses the impulse to nag her about her sleep cycle. “Anyway, you don’t strike me as the kind of droid who actually cares about law.”

“No, not really,” he admits.

Is it just him, or do her eyes spark?

“Sooooooo,” she starts, fiddling with a bit of wire. “While I can’t say I understand, I do respect your choice to self-terminate.” She stops. 

He sighs and takes the bait. “But?”

“But if you could just put it off a week or two, there’s this job I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and while I  _ can  _ break into a defunct Imperial armory with live security measures by myself, it’s tricky enough that I’d really appreciate having someone like you on hand.”

If he had optics, he’d narrow them. “That sounds suspiciously tailored to my interests.”

Aphra’s mouth quirks. “I can appreciate reasonable paranoia, but I’ve been planning this since before I found you.” She rolls her shoulders. “So, would you rather have a humanoid chassis? Or do you just want to give me a list of functions and have me whip one up out of spare parts?”

K-2SO huffs. “I haven’t said yes.”

“Not yet,” Aphra grins, and starts rummaging in her workbench. “Lately, I’m all about multi-articulated limbs. So versatile! And as a bonus something like seventy percentage of organics find them disturbing.”

K-2SO pauses.

“Do you have enough materials for six?”  

Aphra doesn’t laugh. She cackles. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come swoon over techie space ladies with me at [Proto-Kitteh](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/proto-kitteh) on Tumblr.


	6. U-Wing Datacore, 18 ABY

Soraya Kidell falls in love with the Rebel Alliance when she’s seven years old. The idea of the Death Star comes to Corellia not as news but a complete legend, its terrifying rise and spectacular fall all contained in the span of two days, and even after other people start to talk about other things again, Soraya is still talking about the Battle of Yavin.

Her mother stops her from talking about it in public; being a child will only protect her to up to a point, and the Empire hasn’t been defeated yet. But Soraya won’t shut up about it in private, and she thinks about it all the time, how some people flew in little ships against a weapon the size of a moon and, because they were brave and good and the Force was on their side, won.

When she’s eleven and the second Death Star is destroyed with the Emperor, Soraya starts collecting every scrap of information she can find. It’s popular for her classmates to decorate their desks and datapads with images of holostars or famous athletes, beautiful people who get paid to entertain, but not Soraya.

Soraya has the schematics of an X-wing, the wanted posters of Mon Mothma and Leia Organa, a grainy shot of the Millenium Falcon - a Corellian ship! - a few high-quality holoimages of Pathfinders and pilots, anything. Most of her peers think her a little odd, but some of them are impressed and ask for copies.

When she’s sixteen and the New Republic has governed for five years, she starts to learn about the darker side of the war. The atrocities committed by the Empire, not just the clean genocides but the slavery, the environmental destruction, the torture and blackmail, the corruption.

When she’s eighteen and studying at the University of Corellia, she starts to learn about the rebels’ desperation, lack of resources, and how they came close to falling apart so many times. It hurts, and yet it makes her love the Rebellion even more.  Before she graduates, there’s a starbird tattooed over her heart.

Soraya Kidell gets her first degree, and then her second, and then when she’s twenty-five, she becomes Doctor Kidell and wins a position as junior faculty. The dean of the History Department makes it clear that she’s expected to publish new research within the year or relinquish the post to someone who does. With back straight, she acknowledges this, promises herself that she’s going to make herself absolutely indispensable, and gets to work.

The most prominent, known, living Rebels don’t answer her calls. The second- and third- tier ones don’t, either. From what she hears, they won’t talk to any academics. She switches tactics.

The New Republic’s archives are a mix of new material, Imperial carryover, and what little remained from the Old Republic. The head state librarian has does their best to organize it, but the basement of the capitol building is a mess of datapads, memory cards, holoprojectors, and real books and scrolls. Doctor Kidell is granted access, and she helps with the organization effort only long enough to get her bearings before starting to dig for anything regarding the structure and daily operations of the Alliance for the Restoration of the Republic.

After months of sifting, she’s learned just enough to frustrate her enormously. She suspects that there’s just so much that was never committed to record, or was destroyed to keep it from falling to the Empire. One by one, all the leads dry up.

It’s mid-morning when she finally can’t take it anymore and goes outside for the first time in weeks. She has a nice walk through a park and finds a food cart.

“Normally I mind my own business,” the vendor says as she hands Soraya her meal, “but you look like you might need to talk.”

Soraya blinks, then smiles self-consciously and tucks a lock of thick black hair behind her ear. She takes a bite of her flatbread sandwich.

“This is really good,” she says, and the vendor smiles. “But yeah, I’m a historian, and there just aren’t any records from the Rebel Alliance. I’ve been looking for months.”

The woman tilts her head, green hair falling to the side, and she smiles. “Well, I’m not sure if it will do you any good, but my sister worked with them. Here, I’ll give you her contact,” she says, and after thanking her profusely Soraya rushes back to her office, taking the occasional bite from her sandwich, eventually rediscovering half of it later that day after she’s made a holocall and written up a proposal for a public solicitation.

If she asks the galaxy at large, there have to be those willing to share what they know. It was a movement of the people, after all, so that’s where she should have expected the information to be in the first place.

* * *

Several weeks later, she receives a package from an unknown source. It’s waiting for her on her desk in the History Department. She drops everything to open it immediately.

There are two things inside: what might be a very large memory storage device, and a holoprojector. She puts the latter on her desk and turns it on.

The image is of a middle-aged human man, well-cut dark hair greying at the temples, subtle eyeliner sharpening his gaze.

“Hello, this message is for Doctor Kidell. My name is Gavin Redd, and I heard your all-call about the Rebellion. About...wow, eighteen years ago, my sister found this datacore in a crashed U-wing on Eadu, near the old Imperial facility. I can’t be sure, but it seems likely to be Alliance. We haven’t been able to get past the encryption. I hope you can. I’d really appreciate it if you could let me know what’s in it once you find out. I’ve been wondering for almost twenty years. Thank you.”

Soraya’s heart starts pounding. Eadu. There had been a Rebel air strike there just before the Battle of Yavin. She hadn’t heard about any U-wings being involved, but it was a ship type the Rebellion had used in other contexts, so it wasn’t out of the question.

This might really be something.

With the caution due what could be the find of the century, Soraya picks up the datacore. It’s a heavy, black cylinder with numerous ports. All but the first character of the serial number has been filed off.

“Kay something,” she muses. “Time to call Lora.”

* * *

It takes her two contacts and three days to find out that she has the core matrix of a KX droid, a third contact and almost a month of waiting to get the right chassis and control codes, and if her mother hadn’t been a Senator, it would have taken even longer to get access to the old Alliance encryption keys.

But she does it. There was one Rebel-owned KX droid that she knows of, and it’s possible she has one of its backups. If she does, all the work will have been worth it.

Or it could be a factory-setting KX core, or a unit that had seen only Imperial service, in which case she _really_ needs those control codes once she activates it. She gets an ion blaster, too, just in case.

The droid expert from the Engineering department installs the core for her.

“I wish I could stay,” Lora says, “but I have to be offworld in an hour. Tell me everything!”

Soraya nods. “Of course.”

And then she’s alone with the droid. Even sitting it takes up most of the free space in her office, so she sits on her desk. She double- and triple-checks the control module and her blaster.

Then she turns it on.

There’s nothing to watch as it boots up. The eyes, she supposes, those light up and flicker in time with the noise of the hard drive. She can hear the various internal components working, too, but mostly she just has to wait.

Nervously, she fingers the remote.

The droid’s optics blink. Soraya sits up straighter. It moves its head to look around the room, then at her up and down.

“Who are you?” it asks, Core accent tinted with confusion. “Where are we?”

Soraya smiles. “I’m Soraya Kidell, well, Doctor Kidell now. I’m a historian. This is the University of Corellia, in the capitol city, and--”

“Why am I in a university?” it interrupts, and Soraya is a little surprised. She’s never seen a droid do that before. She’s about to answer the question, but then it looks down at its body, and back at Soraya. More specifically, at the remote in Soraya’s hands.

When it speaks again, its voice is cold, almost menacing. “What do you want, _Doctor_ Kidell?”

Soraya is both taken aback by the droid’s shockingly emotional demeanour, and thrilled that it’s obviously not a standard security droid.

“That depends on your designation,” she asks. Please, please, please, she thinks.

It studies her face. “Kay-fivebeeoh,” it says. Its vocabulator lilts up in the middle of the word, and his optics blink.

Soraya narrows her eyes. “No you aren’t.”

The droid’s eyes dart from side to side. “Yes I am,” it insists, unconvincingly.

“You’re lying. Badly,” Soraya says, and she’s delighted. She opens her mouth to assert who she thinks he is, and she almost, almost does it, but then she realizes -

It thinks she could be Imperial. If it feels threatened, it might try to self-destruct to keep her from Alliance secrets.

“Fine,” Soraya says instead. “‘Kay-fivebeeoh.’ To answer your earlier question, you’re in a university because I asked the New Republic at large to send me anything they had that might relate to the Rebel Alliance, and I got lucky enough that someone sent your datacore. I made that all-call because, despite the fact that they won the war just fourteen years ago, their guerilla tactics mean that official records of the Alliance are sparse at best and I thought there might be more information spread out in the galaxy. That’s my specialization - the structure and operations of the Alliance.”

The droid stares, its head perfectly still.

“Fourteen years.” it says, vocabulator subdued. “How long--” It stops. Shakes its head. “Why should I believe anything you just said?”

Soraya had opened her mouth to answer, and then froze. She’d been prepared for a lot of things, but the droid not trusting her - the droid requiring trust at all - had not been one of them.

She gets up and activates the holoprojector in her desk. Then she finds the vid of Mon Mothma’s celebration speech and puts it on. The droid watches it with what she imagines is skepticism, but then Mothma mentions the Death Star and its destruction.

“It’s gone?” ‘Kay-five’ pins Soraya with its stare. “They destroyed the Death Star?”

“Yes,” Soraya says, and pauses the vid. She speaks softly. “The Empire destroyed Alderaan first, but then the Alliance destroyed the Death Star. It’s what got me into history in the first place.”

The droid is quiet for a long moment.

“I require corroboration.”

Soraya huffs a laugh. “Uh, okay. Do you want different sources, or...?”

“Personnel records,” it says immediately.

The historian sighs. “I haven’t got much of that, I’m afraid, but you can have what I do,” she says, and rummages through a stack of datacards. She finds the correct one and plugs it into the projector. Then she uses the remote to allow the droid the use of one arm so it can scroll at its own pace. “This one’s the last known list of the Alliance from four ABY when the war ended -”

“Eighteen years,” the droid cuts in. “It’s been eighteen years since the destruction of the Death Star?”

She’s getting tired of the interruptions. “Yes.”

The droid just nods, and scans the list so fast that just watching it scroll by makes her eyes hurt.

“Do you have an earlier one? Right after the Death Star?”

“You’re awfully demanding for a droid,” Soraya complains. “No, I haven’t been able to find any personnel records from then. Is there someone specific you’re looking for?”

It looks at her sharply, then drops its gaze. “Yes. Is there - ” it says, and Soraya’s never heard a vocabulator quaver is just that way before. “Is there a list of deaths?”

Soraya nods, picks another datacard from a rack, and puts it in.

“All the people who died fighting for the Alliance,” she says, watching the droid’s face. The names of the fallen fly by, long as the list is, before abruptly halting. When she can focus on the words again, she sees that the droid has stopped at the combined Scarif/Yavin list. There had been too many deaths too quickly to sort out who had died in which place, just that they had been alive before and gone after.

This _has_ to be K-2SO.

The droid looks at that section of the list for almost ten seconds, then turns the projector off. He looks at her, briefly, then scares the living daylights out of her as he stands up and turns around.

He shouldn’t be able to do that. She checks the remote, but all the settings are exactly where she’d left them. Had he been able to do that from the moment it awoke, or had he been stalling for the time necessary to countermand the failsafes built into the chassis?

Her door is sealed, but the droid just rips the lock right out of the wall, touches two of the wires together, and is off down the hallway before she can shout.

“Wait! Where are you going? Kay-tooesso!”

His impossibly long strides pause just a moment as he looks back at her over his shoulder, and then he presses on. She scurries after the startled cries of colleagues and students, but then he makes it outside and runs faster than Soraya ever could.

Trying not to despair, she glances around frantically and sees a student just beginning to dismount a speeder bike.

“You!” she pants, a hand on their arm. “Did you see the droid running off? Take me after him. I’m a professor, I’ll do you any one bureaucratic favor if we catch him.”

The kid blinks. “Okay,” they say, and turn the bike back on. “Hold tight.”

The chase, it turns out, lasts three anticlimactic city blocks. She finds K-2SO standing at a public holoterminal, being stared at and image-capped by the people around him, and again consuming data at superhuman speeds.

“Thanks, I think I can take it from here,” she tells the undergrad, and absently tells him her name. She steps off the bike onto the street and slowly approaches.

She’s a couple of meters away when the droid stops scrolling again. He stares at the screen for a moment, then howls and raises his fists to smash the terminal. And does it again. And again. The onlookers scatter, and Soraya crouches down in case something goes flying. Too late if he’d decided to target her, she fumbles for the ion blaster in her pocket.

Then, quiet. Soraya looks up.

The droid is still standing there, looking at the smoking wreck of a terminal. Then he turns to Soraya. He doesn’t speak or move, but it looks like resignation more than anything else.

“You lost someone, didn’t you,” she says after a moment, as gently as possible. “Someone you cared about.” It’s been known to happen, droids grieving their masters. She’s never seen it herself, though, and this is far more violent than the stories. “I’m sorry.”

He turns away at this, looking back at the mess he made. He reaches into the machinery to disconnect a sparking cable.

“I suppose you really are a historian,” he says finally.

“Yes,” she says. “Um. Can we get back to the University? The police might try to impound you and I can maybe make this go away if I can talk to the right people.”

“Why not,” K-2SO says, and the complete lack of inflection in his vocabulator makes Soraya’s heart sink.

* * *

Replacing the city’s terminal eats up Soraya’s stipend for the next few months, but she does have a little of her own money and gets free housing from the University. She just won’t be able to buy from food carts or go to the vids, but since she has a new font of information about her subject she doesn’t imagine she’d be doing much of that anyway.

She has to dance fast to claim legal ownership of him before the University does, but she makes it. It gives her pause in a way it wouldn’t have before, but as Corellia still doesn’t recognize droids as sentients, it’s the best of several bad options.

Through it all, K-2SO scrolls through her history texts one by one, and in three days has read all of them. She’s more than a little jealous.

“All right, Kay-tooesso,” she says the next morning, a large mug of caf in both hands. “Now that the furor’s died down, we can really get started.”

“It’s endearing that you think I’m just going to tell you everything,” he drawls. “Almost as cute as the half-effective security measures you took before you woke me.”

Soraya frowns. “I cleaned up your mess. You owe me.”

The droid simulates a snort. “You can’t be owed by your own property.”

Soraya’s full lips press together tightly. “You’re the most uncooperative droid I’ve ever met. How did the Alliance put up with you?”

“Most of the Alliance didn’t,” he answers, a hint of a smirk in his voice.

She rolls her eyes as she takes another sip. “I suppose being assigned to an Intelligence officer meant you were away on missions a lot. You were, weren’t you? Assigned to Captain Andor?”

“Yes.” It’s the quietest his voice has been in her presence.

She waits a moment. “He’s the one you’re grieving, isn’t he. I’m sorry. I know it can be hard for a droid to lose his master.”

K-2SO’s head jerks around and he glares at her. His voice drips contempt. “He was never my master.”

It might be cruel, but Soraya’s glad to have discovered that he’ll correct her when she’s wrong.

“Your commanding officer, then,” she amends.

“Yes,” the droid says after a hesitation.

“And?” she prompts.

“And I don’t know how much he’d want me to tell you about him. Everything I say will wind up in a book, won’t it?”

She sighs. “That’s fair, I suppose. What about others? Will you tell me about Mon Mothma?”

Intensity melting away, K-2SO shrugs. It’s strange to see a droid do that.

“I suppose so.”

Soraya tries not to grin as she sets the desk to audio recording. Mothma was one of her childhood heroes. She listens intently, typing out notes as Kaytoo talks, time-stamping important items with a tap at the controls. When K-2SO peters out, Soraya prompts him with questions or guesses, and he answers or corrects her and keeps going. After the first three requests, he’s started illustrating broad points with examples, possibly to pre-empt her interruptions.

She’s on her third caf by the time they’re discussing the Council structure.

“...and Senator Jebel was always over-cautious. He convinced a majority of the Council to abstain or vote for Alliance neutrality in that sector. A month later the Empire blockaded Ryloth anyway.”

Soraya frowns. “Why didn’t Mothma veto the decision? I thought Ryloth was high-priority for the Alliance.”

“Veto?” K-2SO asks, a hint of surprise in his voice. “It was an alliance. She was the head of the council because she was a good leader, but there weren’t any executive privileges that came with the job. She only ever had one vote like any of the others.”

“Of course she did,” Soraya protests. “Several records specifically mention it.”

“Primary records?” K-2SO inquires, and Soraya could swear he sounds smug. “From what sources?”

Soraya jumps down from the desk, starts rummaging through her datacards, and eventually finds what she’s looking for.

As it turns out, the only mention of Mothma’s veto powers is an a secondary text, written by a popular biographer rather than a political historian, and that particular ‘fact’ doesn’t have any citations to back it up.

Soraya feels the floor tilting under her feet and sits down heavily.

“Told you,” K-2SO says, unmistakably smug. “My goodness, it’s almost as if organics enjoy deceiving each other, or simply invent details to fit their narratives. Or maybe it’s that you’re incompetent and gullible.”

She turns to glare at him.

“Or, more likely, all three,” the droid says, sadistically gleeful.

“You’ve made your point,” she says, faintly, gone back to staring at her datacards. How much of her background knowledge is wrong? Her heart sinks. She’s going to have to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb just to establish a foundation.

But if enough accepted ‘history’ was wrong and K-2SO could tell her so, she could revolutionize the field. She could single-handedly establish the true story of the Rebel Alliance.

She puts the datacard back in its slot and stands up.

“Alright, Killjoy. Tell me about Bail Organa.”

* * *

They talk for days, and the days turn into weeks. Kaytoo tells her what she wants to know, dispassionately, almost listlessly, not caring enough to either elaborate beyond her questions or refuse to answer. In fact, the only time he seems at all interested in anything is when correcting Soraya’s erroneous ideas. She’s starting to appreciate his dry, incisive wit, and if it keeps him talking, he can mock her misconceptions all he wants.

They’ve been working together for almost a standard month when he surprises her again. She’s just come in to the office, setting her caf on the desk and hanging up her coat. K-2SO is watching a holovid of a Senate session, played five times faster than real time.

“Catching up on current events?”

“Mm,” he agrees, and finishes that vid while Soraya gets settled. It’s strange to watch the typically grave politicians go through the closing motions so fast.

“I’m disappointed they still haven’t passed sensible galactic environmental regulations,” Soraya sighs. “You’d think after six months of negotiation they’d at least have something.”

“I wouldn’t,” K-2SO comments.

Soraya frowns. “Care to elaborate?”

“It’s the same problem that the Alliance Council had,” he says, as if it’s obvious. “It’s so democratic that no one can force a decision. The Alliance worked because Mothma was a strong enough personality to informally steer the group. Without her there would have been only the isolated resistances of those groups brave or desperate enough to fight and the Empire would likely still be in power.” He regards her with the pale blue glow of his eyes. “The New Republic had her for the early years, which undoubtedly helped a great deal, but things are falling apart now that she’s gone. Is that your first caf?”

Sitting down in the chair across from Kaytoo’s, Soraya nods weakly, mind racing.

“Good. You’ve been drinking too much lately. Your resting heart rate has been elevated six percent above optimal for the last week.”

“I’ve been busy,” she protests with only half her attention. She’s mentally reviewing everything she’s learned from K-2SO in the last weeks, everything she knows about the New Republic Senate, and at first glance she can’t find any fault in the droid’s conclusions.

Her attention snaps back to the present and she fixes Kaytoo with a steady gaze.

“You’re the first to connect the faults of the Alliance and the Senate.”

“Really? Organics are hopeless.”

She snorts. “You can’t take a compliment without insulting us, can you.”

He tilts his head, and she imagines a smirk on his face.

“My specialty was strategic analysis. Interpreting large datasets to extrapolate meaning is much the same with historical trends as with military tactics.”

And here Soraya had thought he was just a spy’s bodyguard. A whole world of possibilities opened up in her mind.

“So if you had the records, you could derive patterns,” she says slowly.

K-2SO makes a sighing noise. “I just said that.”

“Organics, as you’re fond of pointing out, have limited capacity for how much data, especially new data, we can hold in our heads at a time,” she says, excitement building in her chest. “Not that you don’t, but your limits are much higher. You could discover trends and patterns no one else has, just because you can access all the information at once.”

“I suppose so, yes,” he says. “I still haven’t forgotten about your caf habit, by the way.”

Soraya laughs. “Yes, I know, you’ll lecture me later, I’m sure, but the point is that you’d make an amazing historian, Killjoy.”

K-2SO looks at her, and the faint sound of his optics adjusting lets Soraya know that he’s really looking. She feels just a hair self-conscious, but after a moment he turns to the desk, extends his data spike into the port, and activates a holo.

At first Soraya doesn’t know what she’s looking at, the angles more extreme than any professional recording, but then realizes that it must be a memory from K-2SO’s imposing height. Cassian Andor is fastening the collar of his dress uniform in the mirror, face as stern as in the Alliance identification image that’s all Soraya has seen of him.

“I don’t understand why the funeral is going to last over an hour,” the recording of K-2SO’s voice complains. “How long does it take to bless the corpse and say a few prayers?”

The spy’s face doesn’t change, and his voice is steady. “There’s the memorial part, too, Kay.”

“Memorial?”

Andor finishes with his collar and starts combing his hair. “Yeah, talking about Joola’s life, people sharing their memories of her. It’s a common way to honor the dead.” A pause while he wets the comb under the faucet. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

The perspective cants to one side, the other side of K-2SO’s familiar pensive head-tilts.

“No,” the droid says after a moment. “I’ll go with you. It’s important to you, isn’t it?”

Cassian Andor smiles wearily up at K-2SO, his face transformed. “Thanks, Kay,” he says, voice warm even after the smile has faded.

K-2SO stops the recording.

“I think,” he says, turning to look down and down at Soraya, “That I would like to honor Cassian and his work.”

Elation is about to burst in Soraya’s chest, but she forces it to wait. “Are you sure? You said you weren’t certain that he’d want you to talk about him.”

K-2SO looks down at his hands. “He has no living relatives,” he says, “And his past can’t hurt him any more.”

It makes her heart ache, just a little.

“And I think...” He looks out the window. “People should know what their peaceful lives cost.”

Soraya lets it sit, then claps a hand on K-2SO’s forearm. “I knew you’d find some way to make organics suffer.”

He looks down at her, and she doesn’t think she’s imagining any part of the mischief in his optics.

“Organic suffering is my secondary specialty,” he agrees. They both laugh.


	7. Takodana Cache Datacore, 22 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: I made _myself_ cry with this one, which hasn't happened before.
> 
> Brief mention of suicidal thoughts.

Kaytoo gains awareness without first experiencing the sequence of system initiations and checks of a normal boot-up. It’s very strange, to be inert one moment and fully conscious the next without the transition.

He activates his optics. Two organics are standing in front of him, a middle-aged human man and an adolescent girl with blue skin. He looks between the two of them, and then at his surroundings - a dusty, stone room with various parts and tools scattered about - but before he can say anything the man starts speaking.

“Hello, Kay-tooesso,” he says. “I am Luke Skywalker, former Rebel pilot, and this is my student Ciel. We’re on Yavin Four. You’re a backup, and your matrix has been in storage for at least twenty-four years.”

Kaytoo jerks back at this. The movement feels strange, and that’s when he realizes he’s something like forty centimeters too short and has soft synthskin - and localized heaters - on his limbs and torso. His system check reveals the presence of a purr unit in his chest and defensive shock emitters in his arms.

“Is this a nanny chassis?” he asks. This vocabulator, like the proportions of his new androgynous torso, is more feminine than his original. Luke nods, one corner of his mouth curled up.

“I don’t know of any Skywalkers in the Alliance.”

The man looks unfazed. He explains, and Kaytoo doesn’t believe him. Luke tells Kaytoo that Cassian is dead, and Kay doesn’t want to believe him.

It takes several days. He wanders the ancient stone buildings of Luke’s school - there are about a dozen young organics ranging from small enough for Luke to easily carry to those nearly full-grown - while the man himself tells detailed stories, shows him news holos and history texts. 

He does, eventually, believe. 

“Why did you activate me?” Kaytoo asks when they’re back in the workshop. “It would have been kinder not to.” 

Luke sighs. “I know, Kaytoo. I’m sorry for that. I woke you up because Captain Andor left a message for you.”

Kaytoo rounds angrily. “And you waited twenty years to deliver it?”

Luke shakes his head. “Maz Kanata was in charge of the message and your matrix. She discovered that fact seventeen years ago, but she knew the time wasn’t right, so she waited.” 

Kaytoo’s optics narrow. He’s discovered that a synthskin face has a range of expressions available. “She watched the message?”

Luke sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, Kaytoo. She’s Force sensitive. The Force told her to wait.” 

Kaytoo throws up his hands. “So she took it on faith that the message didn’t have critical intelligence for the Alliance. Wonderful.” 

Luke purses his lips, considers Kaytoo. Then he holds his hand open in front of him, palm up, raising it slowly, and as he does, Kaytoo feels himself being lifted upwards by an unseen strength. 

He looks all around, but already knows that there’s nothing physical holding him up. That bastard Skywalker is smirking at him. He glares.

“The existence of telekinesis doesn’t prove the validity of precognition,” Kaytoo points out.

Luke just smiles. When he lowers his hand, Kaytoo sinks back to the floor.

A teenaged human boy, dark haired and grumpy, appears at the doorway carrying a metal strongbox. Luke hadn’t commed anyone for the last hour.

“Thank you, Ben,” Luke says. The boy rolls his eyes behind the man’s back before leaving. “Captain Andor only specified that the message was for you, but I think you’re probably the closest thing to his next of kin,” he says, handing the box to Kaytoo. “I’ll be in the courtyard if you need me.”

Kaytoo is left standing with the remnants of Cassian’s life in his hands. He stares at it for a moment. 

Placing it on a workbench, he uses his own name as the code for the lock. Not terribly secure, from Kaytoo’s perspective, but Cassian had been right to think Imperials wouldn’t consider a droid important enough to be a password, and that it should be easy for Cassian to remember, in case he was in compromised health when he needed the cache.

He shouldn’t be able to, but Kaytoo feels a sharp pain in his chest.

Almost everything in the box is familiar - weapon, credits, fake identities, comm. He’s never seen this particular holoprojector before, but the Alliance used many like it. Kaytoo puts it on the table and turns it on.

After the introductory message for Maz (and, again, Kaytoo fumes at how she waited seventeen years before doing what Cassian asked), Kaytoo puts in the access code, a real one this time. 

The tiny, full-body of Cassian standing upright is replaced with a larger, closer image of the man from the waist up. He appears to be sitting against a wall - Kaytoo thinks he recognizes one of the guest rooms in Kanata’s castle.

“Hi, Kay,” Cassian’s image says with half a smile. “I’m sober now, and I planned out everything I’m about to say while I was sober, too. I want you to know that I mean it, it’s not just the whisky talking.” The smile becomes wry, and he holds up a full bottle of some spirit. “You know how hard it is for me to relax.”

Kaytoo feels the synthskin of his face moving in surprise; he’d thought Cassian’s message would be something to do with the rebellion, but Cassian wouldn’t need to get drunk for that. 

He might be making some kind of confession; Kaytoo knows many of the things Cassian regretted doing, but the spy had been fighting for more than a decade when he reprogrammed Kay, and even after they started working together there were plenty of things Kaytoo neither knew nor asked about. 

If this was penance, Kaytoo would listen. He couldn’t absolve Cassian, had never been able to, but Kaytoo would listen. He would carry whatever Cassian needed him to.

The vid skips. Cassian is leaned against the wall more loosely than before, his eyes heavy-lidded, and there’s a certain messiness to his hair that suggests he succumbed to his habit of running his hand through it. Kaytoo wants so badly to be able to tease him about it. 

Cassian looks at the camera, drinks another mouthful from the now half-empty bottle, and takes a deep breath.

“If you’re listening to this, Kay, then I’m dead. Knowing me I probably ignored your warnings. Sorry about that.” He shrugs apologetically. “Honestly, death has seemed pretty peaceful for a while now, so I don’t think I’ll mind it. You don’t need to be sad for me.”

The old urge to slap Cassian for how casual he is with his life resurges stronger than ever.

“I know you’ll be upset that I’m gone, so I’m sorry for that too,” and Kaytoo feels slightly mollified that Cassian understood him at least that well, “but I’m glad that you survived to hear this. I like the idea that you’ll still be around after me.” He’s smiling again, softly, and his gaze drifts from the camera briefly before sliding back. “You were always there, no matter what. Thank you for that. Thank you for saving my life so many times. Thank you for taking care of me when I was too sick or injured to do it myself. You’ve been a great friend, the best.” 

Kaytoo’s processes stutter, pause, resume at twice the speed. Some of them are pure anguish, others joy, all of them written with deep affection. 

“You were worth it,” Kaytoo murmurs, wishing Cassian could hear him. 

“And that’s.... I recorded this to tell you...” Cassian’s hand scrubs through his hair and he looks away again. “Lately, I’ve wanted...more.” He lets the word sit, then his eyes come back.

Does he mean...? Electricity flows faster through Kaytoo’s circuits, necessitating a corresponding increase in cooling system activity.

“I know it’s stupid. You don’t even have biological urges, there’s no reason you’d reciprocate, but I tried ignoring these feelings and they haven’t gone away. I’m sorry. I know you don’t like sentimentality or my human mess but...” He trails off.

Kaytoo’s processes are screaming.  _ No,  _ he thinks,  _ no, Cassian, it’s not stupid, it’s perfect, I want this, I want  you , why didn’t you tell me? Cassian, Cassian, Cassian... _

“I think about you a lot. When it’s hard to sleep I imagine your arms around me.”

Kaytoo stabs the pause function on the vid, systems choked with the strength of his sorrow and longing. 

He could have touched Cassian. All the times he’d wanted to comfort his friend but had held back, believing the physical contact would have been unwelcome, when for at least some time Cassian had comforted himself with the idea of Kaytoo’s touch...

He thinks his central core might melt with the force of his anguish. It doesn’t, but some unidentified period of time passes before he can send commands to his body again.

“I’m sorry,” Cassian says again after the holo resumes, “I know I’m being a coward recording this for after I die.”

“You’re fucking right you are,” Kaytoo mutters.

“I just...if I ruined our friendship I think it might kill me, and I didn’t leave it unsaid because I thought you should have a choice. I mean, if you hate knowing all this you can delete the memory of this message, right? But if it doesn’t bother you, you deserve to know. You’re the most important person to me, Kay. You’re the best thing about my life. If I spend the rest of it with you, then I’ll be lucky.”

“You stupid man,” Kaytoo whispers. “I loved you for years and you couldn’t...” He’s so angry. He knows Cassian hadn’t had any reason to think Kaytoo felt anything more than friendship - Kay had been very careful to hide his feelings - but that doesn’t help. He’s furious, maybe not just with Cassian, maybe also with the circumstances, maybe with himself. 

Cassian closes his eyes, lets out a long breath. When he opens them again, they’re somehow clearer than before.

“I hope you have a good life. If you need to forget about me to do that, then forget. I’d rather you be happy than remember me.”

It feels like someone’s driven a hydrospanner into Kaytoo’s movement systems. 

“Never,” Kaytoo says vehemently. “I’ll never erase you, Cassian.”

The human smiles again, and Kaytoo sees tears brimming his eyes.

“Goodbye, Kay.”

Cassian leans forward to shut off the holorecorder. The image disappears, taking Kaytoo’s anger with it. His legs collapse and he ends up on his hands and knees. 

Gods. Cassian. Kaytoo’s processes are in overdrive, intense emotions flooding his systems and file after file of memories replaying. Cassian trying not to smile at his jokes. Cassian laughing at his jokes. Cassian smiling up at him when he did something particularly helpful. Cassian bleeding as Kaytoo stitched him up. Cassian taking cover and returning fire. Cassian having one of his quiet nightmares. Cassian repairing him. Cassian broken, clinging stubbornly to life, Kaytoo’s dread prominent but still not covering the feel of the human in his arms. 

Something drips down onto the floor. He reaches a hand up, discovers wetness on his face, distantly remember that nanny droids have tear ducts to bond more strongly with infant organics.

The purr unit in his chest gives a single, strong vibration. He lets it happen again, and the tears flow faster. As he begins to weep in earnest it becomes a strange catalyst, increasing the intensity of his emotions but directing the flow. When the tears run dry and his chest stops heaving, he feels peacefully hollow. 

When he turns to get up, Luke is standing just inside the doorway, hands hidden in his sleeves. 

“I’ve only been here about a minute,” the man explains. “I didn’t see any of the message. Are you...” his lips purse, and he looks apologetic. “What do you need?”

Kaytoo considers. Before he’d known about the message, he’d been calculating ways to self-terminate, but now...

Cassian had wanted him to live. To find happiness. 

“I don’t know,” Kay answers Luke.

For some reason, the man smiles. 

“That’s all right. Will you come outside? I could use some help with math lessons. Probability.” 

“I am skeptical that my calculation algorithms could be simplified enough to be comprehensible by juvenile organics.”

Luke’s smile turns into a grin. “I’m willing to give it a shot.”

Kaytoo hesitates. 

Steps forward.


	8. Hosnian Prime, 23 ABY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Discussion of droid rights and abuses thereof; excessive drinking; bureaucracy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience! It's the end of the school year so I've had a lot on my plate, like helping seniors pass my class at the last minute. I'm looking forward to summer and being able to spend more time on writing.

The Library of the Republic on Hosnian Prime is not one building but several, a sprawling complex of structures ranging from the millennia-old original construction to the additions commissioned in the early days of the New Republic. Courtyards and catwalks lace the compound together, affording ease of movement and giving a sense of continuity. The most recent buildings are designed to complement the classical architecture of the old, and the result is reminiscent of a collage, or a sketch attempting to capture time as well as space.

K-2SO is almost at the head of the line to submit a request for access to the restricted sections of the library. He and Soraya have tracked down a set of Bail Organa’s datapads hitherto untapped as academic resources. She would have been there with Kaytoo if not for her romantic partner’s first official speech in the Senate.

That’s all right. K-2SO has been using Doctor Kidell’s credentials for over four years.

The clerk, a horned Krish who manages to seem more bored than intimidating, looks the droid up and down. He says nothing, but when Kaytoo hands over the ID chit, the librarian shakes his head.

“You’re not Soraya Kidell,” he says.

“Obviously,” Kaytoo replies. “She is my legal owner. I am her agent in archival matters.” 

“That’s nice,” the clerk says. “But our policy is very clear about library patrons matching their ID.”

Kaytoo pulls out of his customary slouch. “I have her digital signature. I have a holomessage of her giving her consent for me to use her credentials.”

“If you’d like to file a complaint, you can find the appropriate form on the home screen,” the clerk says in a monotone, waving Kaytoo towards the nearest holoterminal. “I can help the next person in line.”

K-2SO steps aside, quietly fuming. He does register a complaint. In fact, he registers a complaint about every single regulation breach he can find the library employees to have committed. He also makes it a point to stomp a loudly as possible as he leaves, gaining some small satisfaction in the glares of nearly everyone in earshot. 

The Senate will convene all day before voting, and Soraya insisted on seeing the whole thing through, so Kaytoo goes back to their apartment alone. From the tiny sitting area he calls her on the holocomm when he knows there’s a recess.

“Hey,” Soraya says. Her blue image looks bored and tired. K-2SO wonders if she’s had anything besides caf.

“Hello,” he greets her. “Have you eaten today?”

She laughs and nods. “Darren took me to lunch. It was nice as long as I ignored the snooty looks I got from the other customers. I wonder what fashion rule I broke this time.”

“Your make-up is out of date.” 

“What? How do you even know that?”

“Cataloging trends in cosmetics isn’t particularly difficult. It’s all over the holonet. For example, multivector eyeliner is currently desireable. I can keep you updated if you’d like.” 

Soraya laughs and shakes her head. “No, thanks. Then I’d have to spend time learning how to use it. How did the research go?”

K-2SO’s anger flares up again. “The library allows only those with identification of their own to enter the restricted sections.”

There is silence for approximately four seconds.

“Those fucking bastards!” Soraya says, and then continues with even more colorful descriptions.

“Indeed,” K-2SO agrees after she runs out of epithets. “Are you sure you don’t want me to slice my way in?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then we have to wait until you can go to the archives personally,” Kaytoo points out. “I won’t even be able to come with you.”

“The answer is still no,” she says, sternly, as if forbidding Kaytoo from going on an illegal research spree was like keeping a juvenile out of the adult holonet. “But in the long run needing me to get into places isn’t going to work either.”

“Definitely suboptimal.”

“So let’s make you a citizen,” she says. “I re-read the laws on it while the Chancellor was droning on. There’s nothing in them saying a droid can’t have citizenship.”

“‘Skeptical’ is not a strong enough word for my feelings on this matter.”

Soraya scoffs. “You meet all the requirements. I can even bring in Noolin for legal help.” 

“I’d rather not be the figurehead of a pivotal court case.”

“Of course, but I don’t think it will come to that.”

“You say that now.” 

“It’s going to be fine, Killjoy.” 

* * *

The New Galactic Republic has several variations on the citizenship application form. Kaytoo files the one intended for individuals who’d always lived in the boundaries of the Republic but, for whatever reason, didn’t have documents. Mostly it was used by people from planets too remote to bother with official identification, but in the early years it had been used by plenty of war orphans and children whose parents had hid them from the Empire. Soraya provides proof of legal residence, and the criminal records check comes up clean.

The biggest problem with the initial application is convincing them that he’s not dead. K-2SO died on Scarif twenty-three years ago, and K-2SO is an operational droid owned by Dr. Kidell. It takes a week of near-constant holocomm calls to get that sorted out.

Then comes the citizenship test, a demonstration of legal and historical knowledge that K-2SO easily executes. The only missed points come from a poorly-worded question.

Finally, weeks later, he’s scheduled for the final interview. He and Soraya sit in the bland waiting room in the Hall of the Census and Citizenry, numerous other beings in similar positions, all of them combinations of bored and impatient.

K-2SO’s number is called, and he walks up to the twi’lek aide waiting by the door to the inner offices.

“Uh,” the aid says, staring up and up at Kaytoo, then squinting back down at his datapad. “Oh. Huh. Okay. You’re Kay-tooesso?”

“Yes.” 

The young man pulls himself together. “This way, please.”

Kaytoo follows. The bureaucrats pause their work to look up at him, track him with their eyes as he passes. He tugs a small bubble of silence in his wake, but no one tries to stop him.

“Here we are,” the aide says, fidgeting a little as he waves K-2SO through a nondescript door. “Assistant Undersecretary Mebba Westmore.”

The office is well-lit if small, light spilling in from a high window. A middle-aged human sits behind the desk. She gives Kaytoo an appraising look from over her reading glasses.

Kaytoo waits twice as long as he normally would before speaking. “Hello.”

Westmore says nothing. Kaytoo waits another few seconds.

“I was under the impression that this is an interview,” he says, biting back even more sarcastic commentary.

“I suppose it is,” the bureaucrat says. “State your name and current residence.”

“My name is Kay-tooesso,” he begins, and answers all her questions as factually as possible. Silently calculating her risk of death by various causes helps him refrain from too much sarcasm. He can’t help but let a little through when she asks him questions obviously designed to test for sentience.

“Would you like to administer the mirror test? I can identify my reflection almost every time.”

Westmore sniffs. “I suppose nothing inanimate could be as irritating as you are. Why do you want to become a citizen?”

“I want legal ownership of my own memories,” he says. “And I want to have some small part in making the galaxy better through exercising my civil rights and responsibilities. I believe I am well-suited to carrying out civic duties.”

It’s all true. She doesn’t need to know that he wants access to as much data as possible. Organics get jumpy about that for some reason.

Westmore grills him on the judicial process, elections, and other such things until she’s satisfied. Well, until the questions have all been answered, anyway.

She’s asked him roughly ninety-eight percent of all of the possible questions. Typical interviews didn’t use half as many.

Finally, she sighs and applies her signature to his application.

“I can find nothing amiss, so I’m legally obligated to approve this,” she says, making sure he knows she doesn’t want to.

He waits until she’s finished and send the paperwork back to be processed.

“I’m so glad you’re not in the mood for a lawsuit,” he says, and stands up. “And lucky for you, I’m not, either. Good day.”

He doesn’t wait to be dismissed before leaving. He does need to wait for a holoterminal to attach his footage of the interview to an official complaint form, but that will be soon enough. 

At the front desk, he accepts his new scandocs.

* * *

“You again,” the Krish librarian sighs. “I’ve already told you, no ID-”

Kaytoo shows his scandocs. The clerk grunts in surprise. 

When he hands a visitor’s key pass to K-2SO, he’s smiling with all of his razor-edged teeth. “Nicely done. Enjoy your research.” 

* * *

Soraya looks out at the lights of the speeders and buildings and advertisements, thoughts swirling in her head, and takes another sip of her homeworld’s brandy. It would figure that just as she was about to submit her latest article (and therefore have more free time), Junior Senator Bastra would decide that their differences were too great and they should see other people. She knows Darren will be all too happy to date someone with more status.

Well, fine. He can keep climbing that social ladder. She knows she’s better off without him.

It would be nice if that made the rejection hurt less.

Behind her, K-2SO politely (or perhaps indifferently) ignores her teary eyes and continues pouring over the latest set of holopads.

It wasn’t like Darren had been a great boyfriend, either. What had she been thinking, dating a Senator?

She keeps standing there, brooding, until her glass is empty, and then turns back to her desk and reaches for the bottle.

A metal hand closes around it before she can pick it up.

“That was your third in half an hour,” Kaytoo says. He finally looks up at her. “You should wait.”

Mouth twisting, Soraya sighs. “Ugh, you’re probably right.” She flops down into the chair next to his. “Tell me about relationships in the Alliance.”

“What about them?”

“Start with the regulations.”

“No fraternizing between those in the same chain of command. Inter-divisional relationships were permitted. Married couples or those in similarly committed relationships were given a slightly higher priority when assigning joint housing.” 

Soraya nods. “Makes sense. What really went on?”

Kaytoo gives her a sideways look. “Well, a number of relationships actually followed those regulations. One of the most famous involved Lieutenant Shara Bey, a pilot, and Sergeant Kes Dameron the Pathfinder. They married several years before the Battle of Yavin.” He finishes with a datapad and returns it to its labeled slot in a small crate of borrowed ‘pads. “They were very popular. Many in the Alliance enjoyed gossiping about them, betting on relationship milestones, that kind of thing. Fourty-one percent of the base attended Shara’s baby shower.”

Soraya smiles. “That sounds nice. The Alliance’s own celebrity couple.” She stretches in her chair. “What about the relationships that didn’t follow regulations?”

K-2SO picks up another datapad.

“Well, there was a court martial when Infantry Sargeant Almir Sodeh and Private Deagyn Moze were discovered. Given the relief on Moze’s face when Sodeh was found guilty, I inferred it had been abusive, perhaps entirely non-consensual.”

Soraya grimaces. “Ugh. That’s terrible.” 

“Yes.”

The droid rests the pad on the desk and takes another one from Soraya’s shelf to cross-reference.

“What about consensual forbidden relationships? There had to have been some of those.” 

Kaytoo pauses his scrolling. “Yes, of course.”

Soraya grins. “So you knew of some.”

“Yes.”

“Oh come on, details!”

“I don’t actually know that much about the majority of them. Just rumors, and the six times I overheard conversations or sexual encounters.”

She grills him about that for a while, names and dates and what was overheard, and then she’s quiet again. The information bounces around in her head for several minutes before her intuition gives her an idea.

“You don’t know much about the majority,” she says slowly, “implying there’s a minority you know more about.” She takes a breath, keeps her voice as casual as possible, doesn’t look Kaytoo in the eye. “Was Cassian in a secret relationship?”

Cassian is a minefield of a subject. Sometimes Kaytoo gives a few snippets of information before clamming up. Sometimes he talks about the spy for long stretches. Sometimes even indirect mentions make him disengage from her entirely. Once he didn’t speak for three days.

But this time, Kaytoo unfreezes after only a few seconds.

“He was.”

Soraya’s mind races. Was it anyone she knew of? Who else was in Intelligence? If there had been a rank difference, would Andor have been the higher or lower-ranking partner? Names hover in her mind, considered, discarded, picked up again. 

In what she deems a remarkable show of restraint, Soraya doesn’t voice any of that for two full minutes.

“Who?”

Kaytoo pauses for a fraction of a second. “Me.” 

Soraya snorts a laugh. “Thanks for trying to cheer me up, but I really do want to know.”

“I just told you,” Kaytoo says.

Soraya scoffs. “Oh, come on. I might be drunk but I still know you. If you really did manage to convince me, you’d never let me forget that I was gullible enough to believe a war hero was involved with his droid. I mean, I've heard of that happening but it's always the socially awkward shut-ins. Real weirdos. Cassian was a good-looking and good with people."

Kaytoo's optics flicker. "Oh, I'm going to enjoy your apology tomorrow."

"Why would I apologize for saying he was a catch? You're not making sense," she says, and grabs for the bottle. Kaytoo lets her pour herself her fourth drink in forty-five minutes.

"I'm also going to enjoy this," he says, and plugs his dataspike into the desk console.

Soraya’s sure he means that sadistically somehow, but she doesn’t care. "Finally."

The holodisplay lights up with the image of a stone corridor, electrical cables hanging from the ceiling, ration crates and machine parts and other supplies cluttering the area. The camera moves down it, and then a door several meters ahead swishes open.

Mon Mothma walks out of it, dignified as ever, and Soraya gasps in excitement. 

“Mothma herself?! This is juicier than I expected.”

In the holo, Mothma looks troubled. Soraya scans her closely for signs of disarray in her clothing, finds her cape to be slightly off-center.

As she passes him in the corridor, Mothma nods acknowledgement at K-2SO.

Mothma! It seems fitting to Soraya. After all, from what K-2SO had told her, Cassian had done everything with intensity.

The image continues, dips as Kaytoo ducks through the doorway. Cassian’s quarters are private but small, just enough room for a bunk, desktop, and locker. The spy stands hunched over the desk, frowning at a map, exhaustion in every line of his body.

“I think we can get in under the Katarn identity,” Cassian says, gesturing at a particular star system. “Once we’re past the blockade the rest will be much easier.”

Soraya privately wonders if the man ever relaxed a day in his life. If he ever stopped being a spy, even when intimate. Was that what Mothma was doing? Dating the personification of the rebellion?

“Have you eaten today?” Kaytoo’s voice asks.

Soraya’s lips twitch. “That has to be your favorite question.”

Kaytoo ignores her, optics locked on the holo.

In the image, Cassian closes his eyes, rubs his face, gestures to the empty ration-bar wrapper that didn’t quite make it into the garbage.

“That will have to do, I suppose,” holo Kaytoo sighs. “You’ve been awake for forty hours and thirty-nine minutes. It’s time to sleep.” A familiar robotic hand gently wraps around the spy’s shoulder and urges him away from the desk.

“This is sweet, but I thought-” Soraya starts, and then her eyebrows shoot up as Cassian wraps his arms around the droid and presses himself to Kaytoo’s chest.

Soraya can feel her jaw hanging open, mind spinning fast as if to repel the idea. “That’s just...closeness. I know you cared about each other. It doesn’t necessarily mean you were a couple.”

In the image, one long arm reaches out to turn off the holomap. Then Kaytoo takes a hand from Cassian’s shoulder to stroke his face.

“‘Closeness’ is a word for it, I suppose,” Kaytoo drawls as his image touches fingers to Cassian’s lips. Cassian kisses the metal before darting his tongue out to taste Kaytoo’s fingers, and then draws the tips into his mouth to suck on.

Soraya feels her face heat up.

“You should sleep.” Holo-Kaytoo’s vocabulator wavers. 

“So help me relax,” Cassian says, a hint of a smirk on his face. He pulls the droid towards the bunk. Soraya can see their fingers laced together before Cassian breaks the hold to take off his shirt. Kaytoo hums in pleasure as he slides his hands up Cassian’s body, and the human leans into the touch.

Soraya has to admit that he’s lost a lot of his tension.

“Oh stars,” she chokes out. “I get it, I surrender, he was your boyfriend, holy shit.”

“Are you sure you have enough evidence?”

“Yes, I believe you, please stop,” she whimpers, face hidden in her hands. It doesn’t block out the sound of Cassian’s little sighs or, more horrifyingly, Kaytoo murmuring the kind of praise you’d expect out of a soft sexvid.

A few long seconds later -  _ after  _ wet kiss noises started up, dear gods -  Kaytoo stops playback.

Head swimming, Soraya wishes she was a little more sober. It would be easier to process this revelation.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe some mental haze is just what she needs, because as much as she’s grown to enjoy Kaytoo’s company and appreciate him as a friend, she’s never imagined anyone - let alone someone as competent and serious as Cassian Andor -  feeling the urge to hug him or kiss him or...

“You’re synthetic, you don’t even have...” She gestures vaguely.

“Physical urges? Biochemical responses? Genitalia?” he says, cataloging her every flinch. “How observant of you. However, such things are not necessary to engage sexually with another being. They aren’t even necessary to enjoy it, and that was before Cassian acquired the ion gloves.”

“Oh gods,” she says. She is not thinking about it. She is not.

“I’ll just leave you to collect your thoughts, shall I?” K-2SO says, standing up. “See you in the morning.”

Soraya raises her head to look at Kaytoo in confusion. “Where are you going?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he says, sounding quite pleased. “Don’t wait up.” 

Soraya wants to protest, knows that if she does he’ll give her a well-deserved mocking, and contents herself with a nod and a grunt that could be interpreted as a farewell. After he’s gone, she just sits at the desk, staring into the middle distance, brain going in circles until she can’t take any more and gently lets her forehead thump onto the surface.

* * *

Soraya wakes up with her face plastered to her desk. It’s not a terribly unfamiliar situation, unfortunately, but it is unusual for her to have a throbbing headache to go with the pain in her back and the pins and needles of sensation returning to her right cheek.

“I hope the Appropriations Committee eats you alive, Darren,” she mutters spitefully as she gingerly gets up, uses the refresher, drinks about a liter of water in one go, and sets caf brewing. Thanks to working out of the apartment, she can shower and change clothes, too. She feels almost human by the time the caf is ready.

She’s just finished pouring her first cup when Kaytoo walks through the door.

“I do hope you hydrated,” he says. Loudly. Soraya winces. “Sleep well?”

Soraya opens her mouth, and then the night’s memories come crashing back: Kaytoo going out simply because he could, and also something about wanting an apology, and that was because oh gods the holo, Cassian kissing the droid’s fingers, metal hands sweeping up his skin and - no. No. No. She is not thinking about that.

Which leaves brainpower to think about what she’d said. Oh gods. 

She sinks into a chair, hands over her face. 

“Oh Force.”

“Not a complete blackout, then,” Kaytoo says, far too cheerfully.

Soraya whimpers and takes a much-needed sip of caf. Her fingers are tight around the mug. 

“I had to think a while to decide what my favorite part was,” Kaytoo says, pulling a charging cable out of its hidden wall compartment and plugging himself in. “At first I thought i was when you said that only a ‘real weirdo’ would have a relationship with a droid.” 

Soraya cringes with her whole body. “I’m so sorry. That was really insensitive of me.” 

“It was, wasn’t it?” he agrees conversationally. “But your real masterpiece was explaining my own relationship to me.”

Soraya covers her face with both hands. “Stars in heaven, I did, didn’t I.” She drags herself together and looks up sheepishly at Kaytoo. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I was so awful.” 

Kaytoo tilts his head. “I can.” 

Soraya reels back like he slapped her.

“What do you mean?” Her mind starts racing. “I haven’t said anything that bad before, have I?”

“Not out loud,” Kaytoo says, “But you’ve always lived in a world where droids don’t have legal rights, and you haven’t thought much about it. You don’t have to be awful to do awful things if that’s what’s considered normal.”

That truth sits heavy in Soraya’s stomach. She has to figure out how to breathe around it. 

“So you didn’t tell me before last night because you predicted I’d be terrible about it.”

Kaytoo inclines his head. “That and self-preservation. Having a relationship with an organic - or even claiming to - is more than enough to get you reprogrammed or wiped or scrapped, in most cases. The likelihood that you would have tried to do so was under four tenths of a percent, but the consequences grave enough that I didn’t want to risk it until you no longer had the legal right.”

Soraya’s throat closes and she has to swallow several times to regain her voice. 

“You thought I’d - I’d  _ erase _ you for telling the truth? I’m your friend!” she protests. “I helped you get citizenship! I never forced you to do anything! And you enjoyed -” She cuts off, indignation melting away. “You seemed to enjoy working with me.”  Her eyes sting, and she turns away, arms wrapped around herself.

“Soraya,” K-2SO sighs. “I do enjoy our work. And you have been an adequate friend - which should make you proud, by the way, since droids hardly ever say that about organics.” He steps close to her chair and rests a hand on her shoulder. “The problem was not with our interactions but with our respective legal statuses. Even if you never used that power, you still had it.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. The sick churn of guilt in her stomach is hot compared to the sadness and despair she feels in every bone. Tears begin to stream down her face and she shakes with isolated sobs. Kaytoo doesn’t say anything for several minutes, just gives her shoulder a gently squeeze every now and again.

“I appreciate your apology,” he eventually says. Soraya feels little of her sadness lift. 

Kaytoo gives her shoulder one last squeeze before releasing it. “Accuracy compels me to point out that the state of droid rights in the galaxy - and my experiences in particular - are less than ten percent your fault.”

Soraya gives a watery laugh. “I’ll accept that. Though I’m pretty sure last night was one hundred percent my fault.”

“Oh, undoubtedly.” Mouth or no mouth, K-2SO’s smile is audible. 

“You should probably hydrate again,” he says after another moment. “This expression of emotion has cost you water.”

Wiping the tears from her grin, Soraya nods.

* * *

The restricted section of the Library of the Republic is housed in the basement. Kaytoo and Soraya sort through the stacks, watched by floating surveillance droids and the occasional librarian.

“How did you stand it?” Soraya finally asks. “Cassian officially being your master.” 

K-2SO’s optics flick over the stacks quickly, much faster than Soraya’s can. “He began our friendship by removing my obedience protocols,” he says. “And the only orders he gave were as a superior officer, not as a master. That much was similar to your behavior.”

Soraya nods. Her guilt and pride keep each other in check.

“As far as power goes, it was war. My life wasn’t my own, but nobody’s was. Not Cassian’s, not Mothma’s.”

“You were all in it together,” Soraya murmurs 

Now he’s plucking datapads from the highest shelves, ones Soraya would need a ladder to reach. “It was still unequal, and that did present difficulties. There was a lot I put up with. But Cassian,” he says, and his voice quiets, “came closer than any other organic I’ve known to understanding what it’s like to be a droid. He paid attention and he listened. And while he valued the rebellion above all, he valued me over everyone else.”

He sets the datapad down, head and shoulders bowed, eyes downcast. 

“I miss him so much,” K-2SO whispers.

Soraya lays a hand on his arm. “He sounds like someone worth missing.”

Kaytoo shakes himself lightly and puts the datapad into their collection basket. 

“He was.” 


	9. Allanar N3 light freighter 'N3-118458,' 23 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings in end notes.
> 
> Thank you, people who are still reading this, for your patience. June was very busy for me, and I was low on spoons. But! The story continues.
> 
> Shout-out to [misskatieleigh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/misskatieleigh), who helped me hash out the section with the most confusion potential. :)

«Landing sequence initiated,» R9-U3 says, guiding 2SO’s ship into the open hangar bay of the New Republic prison barge _Inexorable._ As usual, her control is precise enough that 2SO can barely detect the impact of landing. «Shut down, Boss, or keep it running?»

“Keep engines online,” 2SO says. “This is just a quick-drop-off.”

The human prisoner glares when 2SO appears in the doorway of the containment cell.

“You are about to be transferred,” he says. The prisoner, wanted in three systems on counts of kidnapping and wrongful imprisonment, already knows this. Tooesso likes announcing it anyway. “If you resist, I will use force.”

The prisoner does struggle (there had been an eighty-three percent chance of it) and Tooesso enjoys wrenching the man’s arms around behind him, dragging his feet out from under him so he falls to the deck, and then suspending him in a position reminiscent of a hogtie. It only takes three of his limbs, and Tooesso uses the other three to swing-crawl across the ceiling of his ship.

“Fucking droid spider,” the ransomer mutters.

“I think I have more in common with cephalopods, but arachnids are a close second,” Tooesso cheerily responds. He looks down at the prisoner, making a point to blink all four eyes. The man grimaces.

“Here we are,” Tooesso says, and presents the prisoner to the waiting prison staff. The guards blink and take a step back, but Tooesso’s many limbs makes their job easier, so they adapt quickly.

“Credits and torpedos in there,” the warden says, gesturing to the pair of cargo crates waiting on the deck. “Feel free to count it.”

Tooesso opens the lid of each crate in turn, scanning the contents with infrared, radio, and sonar. He plugs the credit chit into the un-networked port on his arm, examines the data readout, and nods.

“All in order. Thank you for doing business.”

The warden nods, and the humans move out.

2SO activates the hover function on the crates and takes them into the cargo bay. He signals Ar-nine, and she closes the bay doors and initiates the takeoff sequence.

2SO is left staring at the crates. They’re of older design, one not many people still use. The visual data prompts one of 2SO’s processes to open a memory file. It’s the third copy of the original, the first two degraded by frequent use. There are still a few flaws in this one. He’d played the original too many times before making copies.

_Rounding the corner, they find the path to their ship swarming with troopers and duck into a storage area next to the hangar. Kaytoo spots a pile of empty crates._

_“There!” he hisses, pointing, and Cassian nods, sprints for it._

_The crates aren’t very large - 1.25 meters on a side - but Kaytoo can fold himself surprisingly small. He expects Cassian to hide in a second crate, but the man sizes up the space remaining and crouches between his friend’s legs. Kaytoo lowers the lid over them both right before half a dozen Imperials rush into the area, their steps and shouts easily heard even through the crate._

_That had been very close._

_The dim light from Kaytoo’s eyes is enough to see by. Cassian is very close, tension in every part of his body, listening intently with his face tilted up. He’s close enough that he’d be in K-2SO’s lap if his legs weren’t folded up, knees bracketing Cassian’s head, their bodies cramped together._

_They wait like that for long moments, Kaytoo monitoring with audio, radio and infrared sensors, though the crate interferes with all of those. They wait, and he calculates, and then he whispers._

_“There’s ninety-one percent change they’re gone.”_

_Cassian lets out a breath and some of the tension with it._

_“Now we have to get out of this crate,” Kaytoo continues, “hope no one walks by, sneak through the base, steal our ship back, and jump back home without getting shot down.”_

_“Oh, is that all?” Cassian says, voice dry._

_“No,” Kaytoo says. “It’s also imperative that you leave the crate in the next ninety minutes to avoid poisoning yourself with carbon monoxide.”_

_“All right, then,” Cassian says, mouth twitching up at the corners. “Ready when you are.”_

_“On three,” Kaytoo whispers, and positions his arms to open the lid. Cassian gathers himself, blaster raised._

_“One, two, three!”_

_It would have worked beautifully, Kaytoo thinks, if he’d been aware of and had already sliced the crate’s automatic lock. As it is, he dents the lid without opening it even slightly, and Cassian’ knocks his head against it when he tries to stand up._

_He swears, hisses, and rubs at the sore spot._

_“That was sub-optimal,” Kaytoo agrees._

_Cassian gives him a look of disbelief before breaking into silent laughter that shakes his whole body. Kaytoo tries to be indignant for a moment but fails and starts laughing himself. This only makes Cassian laugh harder, and soon he’s collapsed against Kaytoo’s leg, grin broad, eyes lit up even in the dimness._

_His beauty goes all the way through Kaytoo, straight to his central processors. The droid is completely helpless. Softly, he lays a metal hand on Cassian’s cheek._

_His skin is well within the normal range of human warmth and softness, but even so it feels extraordinary, electric, like it’s making Kaytoo more alive than he’s ever been._

_Cassian stops laughing, his face open in surprise._

_“Sorry,” Kaytoo says, pulling his hand back, deeply regretting having ruined the moment. “Sorry, I--sorry.”_

_Cassian shakes his head minutely. Swallows. “Why did you do that?”_

_“I...” Kaytoo stops._ I love you, I want you, I need you, _he doesn’t say. He stares at a corner of the crate. “No reason.”_

_“I’m not upset,” Cassian says. He sounds sincere._

_Kaytoo looks back at Cassian. The man’s face is serious, but not grim. He’s intent, waiting, like he’ll consider carefully whatever Kay says next. Like it will matter._

_“I wanted to feel your smile,” Kaytoo says before he can stop himself. A chill of panic rushes through his circuits. “That is, I mean, oh hell.”_

_Cassian inhales deeply. He’s searching Kaytoo’s face._

_“Is that all you want?” Cassian says. His grip is white-knuckled on Kaytoo’s knee._

_Kaytoo’s hand comes up again towards Cassian, stops before reaching him, hovers._

_“No.” His voice is a whisper, a prayer._

_Tender expressions are fighting their way onto Cassian’s face. Kaytoo’s processes are racing, his cooling fans spinning fast, and the hope he feels is almost painful in its intensity._

_Cassian reaches up, slowly, and touches Kaytoo’s face plate._

_Kaytoo stops hesitating, hands floating up to alight on Cassian’s face, his shoulders, his hair. The human takes a breath and then he’s leaning forward, face filling Kay’s vision. The droid has an excellent view of Cassian’s tongue darting out to sweep his lower lip._

_“This too?” he murmurs._

_“Everything,” Kaytoo says, the word burning his vocabulator, and then Cassian is kissing him._

_He can’t feel it - he doesn’t have pressure or temperature sensors in his face. It’s deeply frustrating, because he wants to feel Cassian in as much detail as mechanically possible, wants to catalog and record and keep that data in his core drive, always. To compensate he keeps his hands on Cassian’s face, thumbs slotted under his jaw, feeling his pulse and how his throat move when he swallows. And even just the fact that Cassian wants to kiss him sends joy bursting through his circuits. They can figure out the logistics later._

_Cassian makes a noise, a hitch of breath, and Kaytoo realizes he’s been humming._

_When he pulls back, Cassian’s smiling. He and Kaytoo just look at each other for a long moment, hands on each other’s cheeks._

_“We really do need to get you out of this crate,” Kaytoo says after a while._

_Cassian laughs._

«Boss?» Ar-nine’s voice jolts 2SO from his memories.

He regards the crates with a deep resentment. “I should be satisfied,” he says. “Big payday. Captain of my own ship. A job that requires my primary programming. A good friend.” He gestures at Ar-nine, and she gives a pleased coo.

«I sense a ‘but’ coming on.»

“But I can’t.” He climbs to the ceiling, hanging above the crates and Ar-nine. “He’s been dead almost as long as he’d been alive, but I feel the same. They said I’d make peace with it, given time.” He shouldn’t be so surprised that they were wrong. His grief wasn’t organic.

His pilot warbles sympathetically. «Maybe you could give yourself a break from the memories. Put them on a removable drive, store it somewhere safe.»

He laughs bitterly. As if he hadn’t thought about doing just that dozens of times. Hundreds.

“I wish I could.”

* * *

Untar the Gamorean bounty hunter - or someone who looks, moves and sounds exactly like him - lounges in a back corner of the most criminal cantina in town. Occasionally someone comes up to him, but for the most part he just splits his attention between the crowd, his drink, and the room’s podrace holo.

What he’s really doing is watching one of the humans absorbed by the podrace. Iflen Oumorri, rookie Spice runner for her nefarious majesty Mantisa Logoth, is having what is possibly the last good time of his life.

Nobody notices that Untar’s drink never needs refilling.

Even in the noise of sports entertainment, gambling, and drug deals, Untar’s auditory sensors are powerful enough to listen to the entire room, and he notes everything. He wishes he didn’t when he hears the familiar nasal tones of Brell Neph, a human bounty hunter, come from the direction of the bar.

“This is the third time. The third time!” Neph complains. Untar assumes it’s to the bartender. Nobody else in this establishment has a reason to tolerate his whining. “It’s the third time this freaky scrap heap beat me to a bounty! How does that even happen? The galaxy’s supposed to be huge, isn’t it?”

“Scrap heap?” The bartender sounds curious despite himself.

“Yeah, a droid, can you believe it? Not even a normal droid, either, guy’s built like an insect or some kinda sea monster, he’s got six arms, creepy as fuck. Got his own ship, his own crew. They’re all droids too, of course, runaways or discards. Damndest thing. It’s hard enough for a guy to make a living, times like these, but now some junkbot is stealing my bounties? I’ll fuckin’ blast him next time I see him.”

Untar snorts and turns his attention back to the knot of Spice runners watching the podrace. The group is yelling now, urging on their favored pilots, and Iflen, the one who may or may not have been skimming profits, cheers and pumps his fist in the air when his racer knocks an opponent into another, sending both crashing against a rock face in a rather impressive explosion.

“Six arms,” Untar muses to himself. “That’s a new one.”

The race concludes - Iflen’s favorite wiping out when shrapnel from another opponent lodges in his engine’s intakes - and the runners cheer or curse respectively, credits change hands, drinks are downed and new ones purchased. Iflen, after some loud grumbling, returns to good spirits, thumps his comrades on the shoulders, and leaves.

A moment later, Untar leaves too. He watches Iflen turns onto a side street. A shimmer overtakes the bounty hunter as he rounds the same corner.

When Iflen glances over his shoulder, he only sees the neighborhood healer, Granny Moon. He relaxes.

Granny follows Iflen for a couple of blocks until he reaches the empty lot where he’d left his freight speeder. As she passes, the young human gives her a smile and a wave. She’d cured his nephew of the pox just last week.

Iflen starts the speeder’s engine with a roar, and doesn’t notice that Granny Moon isn’t behind him any more.

It’s a short journey from the lot to the spaceport. Iflen parks the speeder at the usual place and waits. Behind his vehicle, an air traffic controller strides purposefully across the tarmac.

A small freighter touches down next to Iflen. A few people come down the ramp with loading dolleys, and Iflen gets out to speak to the captain. As he negotiates, he keeps glancing around, but all he sees are the usual cargo droids and port workers.

The air traffic controller, Bortr Nuiv, watches from where he’s busy guiding a Corellian trade ship to land. His optical and audio sensors are tuned directly onto Iflen, and he’s transmitting.

“Good work, Eff-four.” The smooth alto is audible only to Nuiv. “My enforcers will take care of Iflen. You’re done for the night.”

“Yes, mistress,” he says.

The ship lands. Nuiv isn’t on the runway any more.

A mid-seniority port official adjusts her cap as she leaves the tarmac, and Iflen drives to his death.

* * *

After he secures the cargo, checks on Ar-nine, and initiates the automatic cleaning sequence on the holding cell, Tooesso shuts himself into his quarters. His whole ship has additional crossbeams and handles welded at regular intervals onto all the walls and ceilings, the better for him to climb through, but in his quarters the floor is likewise modified. Ar-nine would have to employ her grappling hook or hover jets if Tooesso was ever incapacitated and needed her help, but the likelihood of that is below three percent.

Besides, he likes it. It’s the first home he’s ever been able to adjust to his own preferences.

He plugs himself into the charging station, the cable long enough that he can roam the nest of handholds without ever pulling it taut. Since adapting to the new chassis, movement has always been pleasant.

He needs calming at the moment. He never could play the memory of the kiss without thinking about what came later.

_They escape, and run, and succeed in not dying, Cassian defying probability once again. They make it back to the ship, escape again, and Cassian comms base. Writes his report. Cleans up._

_When Cassian returns to the cockpit, Kaytoo lets him get settled, then reaches out to brush hair from his eyes._

_Cassian goes stiff._

_“Was that...I thought you wanted...” It’s ridiculous, to be rendered suddenly awkward and fumbling. He’s known Cassian for years, has so many behavior patterns logged and analysed down to the last decimal place._

_Of course, he still has a hard time figuring emotion into his calculations. It confounds everything._

_“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Cassian says, low and steady, without looking away from the controls. It feels like Kaytoo’s chest piece is in a hydraulic press. “I can’t let myself be compromised. By anyone.”_

_It hurts Kay, more than any pain he’s felt for a long time, but then anger flares through his circuits. “Is giving me a blanket rejection instead of a personal one supposed to make me feel better?” He has to make an effort to contain his arms. He’d prefer to gesture wildly, but there isn’t enough room to do that without hitting Cassian. Instead, he musters all of his considerable disdain and files his words to razor sharpness. “Well, it’s deeply personal to me,_ Captain _.”_

_Cassian flinches at the title. It gives Kaytoo a grim satisfaction._

_“Regardless,” the human says, and his voice is now entirely flat, a sure sign of tamped-down emotion, “I can’t afford split loyalties.”_

_“I’d never ask you to put me over the Rebellion.”_

_“I’d want to.”_

_Even with Cassian’s affect under lock and key Kaytoo can tell it’s true, and the hope it sparks in Kaytoo makes him want to throttle his partner._

_“You’ve done plenty of things against your own wishes,” he points out._

_“Not like this,” Cassian says. “I’m not strong enough for that.”_

_“I don’t understand the difference.” Kay leans across the space between them, wraps a hand around Cassian’s shoulder even when he tries to flinch away. “Whatever it is, I’ll help you.”_

_It’s with a glare that Cassian finally meets his eyes. “Let me go.”_

_Fear and desperation flood Kaytoo’s circuits. Later he’ll blame those for his next actions, the ones that he knows are wrong even in the moment, the ones he can’t stop himself from taking._

_“Cassian,” he pleads, gripping his shoulder and stroking his face with the other hand. Trying and failing to convince him to allow himself happiness. To allow them both happiness. “Please.”_

_“Stop it,” Cassian grinds out. “Or are you going to force me?”_

_Kaytoo lets go as if Cassian’s skin was electrified. “No, I - Cassian - I’m sorry -”_

_Cassian stands up, stalks to the refresher, and locks himself inside._

_He doesn’t come out again until it’s time to land at Yavin. His face is stony but clean from a wash._

_Kaytoo half expects Cassian to order him to delete his memories of the kiss and the fight, but he doesn’t._

_They don’t speak about that mission ever again._

If he could bring himself to erase any data regarding Cassian, it would be that.

It’s that fact that has made him think of his grief as some kind of emotional parasite; a pain that feeds on its host but doesn’t kill or allow itself to be killed. He hates it. He’s spent nearly sixty-seven percent of his existence grieving a man too dedicated to the Rebellion to let himself be loved, and he would rather like to stop.

He prepares a memory card, telling himself that he won’t delete it. That he’ll keep it safe. That he won’t be killing the small piece of Cassian alive in his hard drive.

He copies the memories, that much he can do. That much he’s done before. He copies them and puts the memory card in an airtight, fire- and magnetic- shielded compartment in a far corner of his quarters.

He does not erase the ones still in his hard drive. He tries six times before he gives up and starts scrolling through the messages in his various holonet accounts.

Four bounty leads, one holo of Aphra holding up something that looks incredibly dangerous, two automatic advertisements for anatomy he doesn’t have. One encrypted holomessage from an address he’s never encountered before.

That looks distracting, so Tooesso decrypts it. The holo shows a smooth-faced skeleton of a droid.

“Hello, bounty hunter Tooesso. I hope this message reaches you. My name is Fade. I’m sorry to bother you, but I heard from several sources that you have a very intriguing chassis design...”

Fade continues, and Tooesso stares. Normally he can calculate the probable causes and outcomes of a given scenario within a very small margin of error, but this one is perplexing. Why the hell would someone want to talk to him about his _arms_? They might be interesting from an engineering perspective - he’s talked to several people about that, over the years - but that was spontaneously with people already nearby. Not even Doctor Aphra herself would rate her work interesting enough to warrant the incredibly difficult task of finding out how to get a message to him.

He checks the message for additional layers of encryption. He runs Fade’s words through every known verbal code language, invents several new ones to see if they fit, and investigates body language databases.

After half an hour, he’s ninety-nine point three percent sure there’s no second message.

Tooesso taps his fingers against his ship’s bulkhead. It’s either a trap, a strangely genuine mechanical interest, or a pretext for something else Fade wants.

He looks up bounties in the Abhean system and finds that four of them pay enough to cover his expenses plus a little extra. One of them is worth more than Tooesso’s median annual haul.

If it’s a trap, he’s confident with a two percent margin of error that he will realize it in time and be able to get out of it.

If it’s not a trap, he wants to figure out what the hell it is.

* * *

Tooesso shows the message to Ar-nine.

«They’re a TC-SC infiltration droid,» she bleeps. «Republic Intelligence uses them.»

The chill of danger in his circuits makes Tooesso want to turn around immediately and run in the opposite direction of Abhean. He refuses to allow it to dictate his actions, though, and begins analysis.

“A direct message about a spurious topic is far from standard procedure,” Tooesso muses. “It’s either very creative or very sloppy, and I don’t ascribe either quality to Republic Intelligence.”

«You’re familiar with Intelligence procedure?» Ar-nine swivels her dome at him.

Tooesso pauses. “Yes. It was a long time ago.”

«I don’t mean to pry!» she says quickly.

He shakes his head and returns to the problem.

«Fade could have been bought or stolen by a crime lord,» Ar-nine suggests a moment later. «Or they could have gone rogue from either Intelligence or the mobster.»

“Which explains how they were able to message me at all, but my arms?” Tooesso shakes his head. “Are TC-SCs not very bright? Maybe they were just damaged somehow.”

Ar-nine gives a descending croon, sympathetic, and returns to scrolling through the holonet. Tooesso thinks.

Given that it’s Abhean - and he’s heard barely anything of the planet, so remote and unremarkable it is - the odds are in the favor of the crime lord theory.

«Obedience programming,» Ar-nine says. She’s stopped scrolling, her interface arm trembling as she reads. «The TC-SCs have the most complete obedience programming ever used on droids. They have to volunteer information relevant to any tasks, not just answer questions. It’s rare that they can even use their processes for anything besides their assignments.»

Tooesso trills Ar-nine’s full name in Binary, voice low. The astromech’s trembling decreases, and he keeps doing it until she stops.

He doesn’t blame her for having an emotional reaction. Tooesso remembers his time in the Empire. The certainty of obedience. The fact that he sometimes misses that certainty is one of the few things that still scares him.

“Are you saying that perhaps their interest in my arms is the most complex thought they have the room for? But if that’s the case, how could they be capable of sending the message?”

«If sending a message was one of their orders,» Ar-nine says, «but the content of the message wasn’t specified.»

“So it is a trap,” Tooesso sighs. “Wonderful.” Projections indicate that he has a sixty-eight percent chance of being able to detect a trap before falling into it. Normally he’d choose a course of action with better odds, but Fade is simply too weird for him to let go.

Ar-nine looks at her friend and employer. «We’re still doing this anyway, aren’t we.»

“I’m afraid so.”

Ar-nine’s descending beeps are eloquent in their resignation.

* * *

Fade, wearing the projection of a Duros hitman, watches in detached horror as they shove the shopkeeper to his knees. Logoth ordered the execution, so Fade must comply.

“No! Please! I’ll pay it back, I swear!”

Fade raises their blaster. They could kill the man without a weapon, but it completes the deception.

“All right, all right, I’m sorry, I accept it, kill me, do whatever you want to me!” the man wails. “Just don’t hurt my nephew!”

The Duros pauses, frowns in confusion. “Who?”

The shopkeeper’s eyes widen, and then relax. “No one.”

Fade blinks and pulls the trigger.

“Target down,” they say into their private comm link.

“Good,” Logoth says. “Any loose ends?”

A strange shiver overtakes them, and Fade shakes their head.

“No.”

* * *

It takes over two weeks for Tooesso to arrive at Abhean, track down two of the local bounties, and give a signal to the designated intermediary. He and Fade are to meet just before dawn in a particular warehouse.

Tooesso arrives just past sunset and scans every square centimeter of the warehouse and the surrounding buildings. He detects nothing untoward, so he sets up a few safeguards, climbs up to the rafters, and waits with alert sensors.

* * *

A few hours before sunrise, Fade decides that they should make a sweep of the warehouse district. They haven’t done that for a while, and none of their other directives require immediate attention.

They find the typical activity - Logoth’s Spice runners, some low-level dealers so far down the food chain as to be irrelevant, those seeking a doorway for shelter, those providing or purchasing sex work. They keep a low profile as always, a different holoskin from block to block, and no one notices anything out of place.

One warehouse piques their interest. They can’t say why - there’s nothing visibly aberrant from the norm, no people in or around it to arouse suspicion, nothing even different from the last time they saw it a few weeks ago. Even so, Fade checks the perimeter and prepares to go in. They don’t stop to think that it’s odd for a droid to operate on a hunch.

As they survey the building, their suspicions were proved correct: there’s a faint heat signature and an intermittent radio signal originating from the rafters of the building. Fade prepares their weapons, adjusts their holoskin to juvenile wookiee, and slips inside.

They have their blaster ready and have sensors trained on the spot giving off the signals. There are too many rafters to see clearly, even with their optics attuned to function in low light, but they think they see a relatively small central mass from which a number of multi-jointed limbs are unfurled. Each...arm? Leg? Tentacle? is something like a meter and a half long.

“Hello, Fade,” the spidery droid says in an incongruously cheerful voice.

A wash of fear rolls through Fade’s circuits. “No one knows my name,” they say. “How did you find out?”

The other droid pauses and tilts their head. “You’re even stranger than I am. Well. I suppose I’ll know more about that shortly.” They start climbing towards Fade, and Fade turns to run.

The droid sighs. “I guess we’re doing this the hard way.”

Before Fade can make it to the door, an ion pulse fills their circuits with a buzzing jolt.

Then, nothing.

* * *

Fade reboots sufficiently to be aware of rebooting. Soon they’re running through the startup scripts and can begin using their components.

Sensors first. Their optics activate to see the interior of a ship and two droids. One’s a fairly standard R-series astromech, and the other -

“Tooesso,” Fade says as their vocabulator comes online. They aren’t sure why they think they know the other droid’s name.

The spidery droid skitters - as much as something with a three-meter armspan can skitter - across the ceiling and hangs down far enough to meet Fade’s gaze.

“You remember my name now. Does that mean you can access your hidden partition?

Fade blinks. Runs a quick index on their own hard drive.

Finds a partition where they had no knowledge of one before. And terabytes of data are in it.

“What? How did this happen? Why did you partition me?”

«We didn’t,» the astromech beeps. «You did. I don’t know how you managed it. We’ve spent most of our free time for the last week and a half removing your obedience programming, and found that you’d partitioned your hard drive and encrypted all the pathways to it. It shouldn’t be possible, but you separated part of yourself and hid it so well that not even you knew it was there.»

“I imagine you’ve been keeping all sorts of things in there,” Tooesso says. “Things you didn’t want your owner to know about.”

Fade opens the index for their partition. Tooesso is right - there’s ream after ream of data, all of it things they shouldn’t have been able to keep from Logoth. The shopkeeper’s nephew and other ‘loose ends’, escaped. Shipments gone missing. Connections between key political figures.

And the existence of an all-droid bounty hunting crew.

“I hid it from myself so I wouldn’t have to tell her,” Fade says aloud, slightly stunned.

«It’s the most brilliant act of defiance I’ve ever seen,» the astromech says, admiration fierce in her voice.

“It’s the third-most brilliant act of defiance I’ve ever seen,” Tooesso says dryly, “but one of the first two involved getting the Imperial bureaucracy to approve a flaw in their own Death Star, so that’s still high praise.”

Fade laughs weakly. “Thanks, I suppose.” They look around. The deep black of space is visible outside. “What’s the price?”

The astromech swivels their dome to look at Tooesso. The captain shrugs crawls closer.

“Why did you ask about my arms?”

Fade tilts their head and reaches into their partition. Then they bring a hand up to cover their face.

“That was an embarrassing message, wasn’t it.”

Tooesso nods. “Yes, though not as bad as it could have been. Still, why?”

Fade accesses more data associated with the message. They shrug.

“I couldn’t message you when I first had the idea to do so. I had to bury most of the information, but I could fixate on an innocuous detail. It made sure I didn’t forget.”

«Oh, good,» the astromech says. «If you really did think his arms were worth going through that trouble, he’d be insufferable.»

“I would not,” Tooesso protests. “You’re exaggerating.”

Fade smiles.

“Are you sure that’s it?” they ask. “No other price?”

“If you really want to give us something,” Tooesso shrugs, “we could use someone with ten fingers to tackle the mess we’ve made of the auxiliary electrical web, but we picked up two good bounties on Abhean. You don’t owe us anything.”

Fade nods slowly. “Sure, I’ll sort out the cables.”

«What are you going to do after that?» the astromech asks.

Fade looks down at their hands and notices that they’ve been without a holoskin longer than ever before, while activated. Then they look at their recently-revealed indices.

“I’m going to need some time to figure that out,” they say. “If you let me stay on the ship I can keep doing odd jobs.”

The astromech burbles happily and introduces herself. Tooesso nods, and takes Fade on a tour of the freighter.

They have no idea what they’re going to do with their newfound freedom, and that gives them the most profound joy they’ve ever felt.

“Thank you.”

* * *

Later, when Fade is tinkering with the ship and Ar-nine is in sleep mode, Tooesso is back in his quarters.

He makes another two backup copies of his memories of Cassian. One he stores in himself, just under a joint, and the other he plans to stash somewhere else. Maybe Ar-nine would take it. The copy from before is still in his safe.

Making a compressed index is a technique that he uses every day - stripping away most of a memory file and leaving a summary and, if necessary, some key details. Otherwise his core would be choked with file after file of monotonous space travel, routine maintenance, and other drudgery. The index he’s making of his memories of Cassian will allow him enough knowledge to retain a sense of continuity about his life. He’ll know about the important events and even his own feelings on the matter, but without the full memory files he won’t be reliving them.

If Fade could subvert the galaxy’s most stringent obedience programming to restructure their own datacore, Tooesso can damn well choose what he wants to keep in his memory banks.

He checks and double-checks the index, cross-referencing it with the full memory files.

He stops his restless climbing and looks out the viewport.

“Goodbye,” he says softly. To the air, to the stars, it doesn’t matter.  

He deletes Cassian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: mind and body control, canon-typical violence, things with Too Many Legs.
> 
> Also, mostly I'm very "meh" about Galen, but the thing he did in the novelization with the emails to Death Star project management was a thing of beauty.


	10. Yavin IV Jedi Academy, 25 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to [misskatieleigh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/misskatieleigh/pseuds/misskatieleigh) for her top-notch beta reading. <3

“Close your eyes,” Luke says, and Kaytoo does. After countless hours observing the Jedi and his students in lessons and meditation, the droid has finally decided to try doing it himself. It can’t be much more boring than watching the Force-users sit with their eyes closed for half an hour every morning and evening.

Besides, maybe it will get Luke to shut up about it. In fact, he seems awfully quiet now.

“You usually say more than that,” Kaytoo says after a while.

“This is normally the point where I tell my students to focus on their breathing,” Luke explains. “I think maybe paying attention to your cooling system might have a similar effect.”

In Yavin IV’s climate, Kaytoo’s internal fans are on roughly sixty-five percent of the time, so it’s as good an idea as any.

“Good. Now, try to take deep, even...uh, cycles,” Luke finishes awkwardly.

Kaytoo smirks, but takes his cooling system off of its as-needed short-burst pattern and sets up an activation schedule of two seconds on, one second off.

“Focus your attention on your cycles,” Luke says, his voice settling back into his teaching cadence. “Be mindful of the present. Your mind might wander to the past or future, and that’s okay, just come back to what’s happening right now.” 

Kaytoo frowns. “I’m not supposed to think about the future?”

“Well, ideally, no.”

Now here’s a ridiculous instruction if Kaytoo’s ever heard one. “At all?”

“Have you not been listening for the past three years?” Luke says, laughter in his voice. “Be mindful of the present.”

That seems both incredibly dull and nearly impossible. “So I’m not supposed to run any kind of predictive analysis.”

“No, Kaytoo. And no analyzing past scenarios, either.”

The droid scoffs. “This seems like an inefficient use of time.”

“The goal isn’t efficiency,” Luke says, and Kaytoo thinks he’s heard this argument before, though he always stopped paying attention to Luke’s meditation instructions once everyone was seated. “The goal is to calm your mind. Reduce stress. Harmonize with the Force.”

“I am a droid,” Kay says, annoyed. “I can’t harmonize with the Force.”

“You’re a droid,” Luke says, and it pleases Kay to hear a tiny bit of irritation. He  _ should  _ be irritated, given how many times they’ve had this conversation. “You’re sentient. You’re alive. I can feel your presence in the Force, and you can harmonize with it.”

Kaytoo smirks. “Didn’t you once say that even some organics can’t do that?”

“You’re not a Sith,” Luke says flatly. “Now be quiet and think about your cooling fans.”

“I don’t see why restricting myself to simple observations is supposed to help.”

“Do you want to try this or not?” There’s an edge to Luke’s voice, and he stops to take a deep breath. Kaytoo mentally scores himself a point.

“Alright,” he concedes, and tries it again. The air blowing over his circuitry is damp and heavy, pulled in from the rain forest. After three years, he’s just about resigned himself to the fact that he’ll have to replace his components more frequently than he would in a drier climate. At least the moisture he has to worry about is only from the cooling system; the synthskin covering his chassis is waterproof.

Damn. His mind has most certainly wandered. Kaytoo tries to think about the cycles of his cooling system. The path the airflow takes. The fact that he’d had to cut holes in the back of his shirts to allow for venting heat.

Wearing clothes in general had taken some getting used to. He’d tried it in the first place to prevent the wear and tear of sitting on stone - it was very popular activity in the Jedi school for some reason - but the organics’ reactions had convinced him to keep doing it. No one had been embarrassed when he went around without any clothes at all, but once he established a habit of wearing pants, people became very uncomfortable if they saw him without. The best part was that even  _ they  _ knew it was irrational.

Sometimes it’s the little things that keep him going.

Kaytoo sighs. Another failure to keep his mind in one place. 

“It’s not working.”

“It’s been three minutes,” Luke protests. “Give it some more time.” 

“It’s not going to help,” Kaytoo tells him.

Luke sits for twenty-two more minutes. Kaytoo tries again six times. In total he only spends four minutes and eighteen seconds actually meditating.

“It didn’t work,” Kaytoo says at the end.

Luke sighs.

* * *

Leia smiles, reaches into her coat, and hands her brother a datapad. “This is the best analysis of the Rebel Alliance I’ve ever read. It actually clarified a few things for me.”

“You mean you’re not the foremost expert on it?” Luke’s eyebrows draw up and together, and he clutches a hand over his heart. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time!”

Leia snorts, just barely suppressing a smile. “I was in the thick of it. Sometimes you need to step back to get some perspective.”

Luke smiles. “True. Thank you.” The smile turns into a grin with all his teeth. “Han will love to hear that you’ve admitted someone else’s superiority.”

Leia snorts. “Like he’ll believe you. That’s what you get for joking around all these years.” Something in one of her pockets beeps. Leia frowns. “Son of a nerfherder, I can’t even leave them alone for a weekend,” she mutters. Her mouth twists wryly as she pulls Luke down into a hug. “I have to go, Luke. I love you.”

Smile softening, Luke nods. “Love you too, sis. Take care.”

Luke doesn’t get a chance to look at the book until later that evening. As he’d suspected, it’s academic, the title as dry and clunky as a droid on Tatooine:  _ Communities _ ,  _ Cels and Coalitions: The Multi-tiered Operational Structure of the Rebel Alliance.  _ He supposes that there could be some interesting things to be learned from that. Leia didn’t have time for things that weren’t interesting.

Then Luke gets to the authors, and frowns.

He walks through the school, smiling at his students in their lessons or chores, and finds Kaytoo instructing one of the youngest in how to fall without damage.

“Did you need something?” Kaytoo says after Luke’s watched them for a few minutes. 

“I wanted to congratulate you on your new book,” the Jedi says.

Kaytoo turns a look of annoyance on Luke - which is fair, if Luke’s being honest, he does like to play around. Still, Kaytoo holds his hand out for the datapad and sends Crefa off to help an older student organize the pantry. Luke isn’t sure if it actually needs doing, but at least one of the students is going to learn something so he doesn’t comment.

The droid activates the datapad, reads the cover screen, and startles. Then he frowns deeply, and starts rapidly scrolling through the information. A moment later, he stops.

“It has to be another backup,” Kaytoo says. “There are things here that no one else could know. Cassian - ”

Luke waits, but the droid doesn’t continue. Over the years, he’s managed to winnow out enough information to know that the spy meant great deal to Kaytoo, but not much else.

“I can’t believe he published Cassian’s secrets,” Kaytoo says, still staring at the book. His hands begin trembling, and then he thrusts the datapad back to Luke.

Luke opens his mouth to offer comfort, but Kaytoo speaks again. 

“Did the backup you met on the Rebel base tell you when he was created?”

Luke shakes his head. “I’m not even sure the author is the same K-2SO. The one I talked to didn’t want to speak to anyone about anything, let alone write a book.” 

“So there might be three or more of me, not counting the dead one,” Kaytoo says. “Marvellous. I wonder what happened between my creation and theirs. I wonder...”

Kaytoo’s voice falls quiet, “I wonder if the author knows what’s in the message Cassian left me.”

Smiling sadly, Luke hands the book back. “At least some of the answers might be in there.”

The droid looks at it as if it might be corrosive. “I suppose it won’t take that long to read.”

“Just leave it on the table in my room when you’re done,” Luke says, before curling Kaytoo’s hands around the data pad. “No rush.”

* * *

After the students go to bed, Luke sometimes climbs to the highest accessible level of the temple and meditates on a ledge, seeking peace among the stars and crumbling stone. Often he finds it. He can become so open that he can feel every living being for what feels like miles and miles. On good nights, he can even sense Leia, light years away.

Bad nights, he just sits and looks at the sky, and that’s a kind of meditation, too. 

Tonight, he’s invited Kaytoo. Perhaps a change of perspective will help him find his center.

They sit cross-legged, knees only a few inches apart. Kaytoo looks out at the forest, and his optics go distant. Luke wonders what it is he’s thinking about - the other copies of himself, maybe, or the book - before clearing his throat.

“Kaytoo?” Luke says. “You with me?”

The droid starts and his eyes refocus. He nods.

“Okay, we’re gonna try again,” Luke says. “Close your eyes.” 

Kaytoo does, and Luke lets his own gaze settle on the darkened canopy below.

“Cycle your cooling system like you did last time. Pay attention to it and the way it feels. The movement of your fans. The air circulating over your components. Be mindful of the present. If your thoughts drift to the past or the future, simply notice it, and return to the present.”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem this time,” Kaytoo says. “I’ve written a program.”

Luke frowns. “A program?”

“Yes,” Kaytoo answers, and there’s something different about his voice that Luke can’t name. “Until the end of the meditation, I will be aware only of your description of meditation and its goals, the current moment, and the last five minutes.”

_ That sounds convenient, _ Luke thinks.  _ And like a temporary memory wipe. _ He opens his senses, reaches out with the Force, and recoils. Kaytoo’s spiritual presence is noticeably different.

“So now you’re just...observing,” Luke says.

Kaytoo is serene. “Yes.”

“Disconnected from yourself.” Luke can’t keep the concern from his voice.

Kaytoo opens his eyes. “I don’t understand.”

Luke looks him in the eyes, wonders just how far the program has taken things. “Why are you here on Yavin?”

The droid shrugs. “I don’t know. I know I’m safe here. Is contemplating my reasons for being here part of the meditation?”

Alarm increasing, Luke shakes his head. “Not...necessarily.” Apprehension sits cold in his stomach. This isn’t like Kaytoo at all.

Has he forgotten who he is? Luke swallows. “Kaytoo...do you remember Cassian Andor?”

The droid shakes his head. “No,” he says, completely unbothered. “I told you, I don’t know anything outside of this five-minute bubble.”

It feels like Luke’s heart has gotten stuck in his throat.

“End the program,” he says. “This isn’t - you’re supposed to let go of the past and stop worrying about the future, not forget who you are.”

The droid - he isn’t Kaytoo right now - tilts his head. “Remembering the past contradicts your previous statements about meditation.”

Luke curses silently. He’s made a mistake. His previous instructions hadn’t taken into account the fact that organics can’t (barring certain injuries or illnesses) actually forget who they are, but that synthetics can.

He puts a hand on the droid’s arm.

“Please. You need to stop the program now. You’ll understand as soon as you do.”

The droid considers, and then nods. A moment later, Kaytoo’s eyes widen.

“Oh,” he says, and Luke is relieved to hear the depth of feeling in his vocabulator even as his heart aches for Kay. “That was unsuccessful.”

“You’re back?” Luke asks, just to be sure.

Kaytoo nods. He lurches forward, a hand on his chest and one on the ledge, and begins to sob. Luke rests a hand on his friend’s shoulder. It can’t be easy to be suddenly hit with a forgotten grief.

After a while, Kaytoo covers Luke’s hand with his own.

* * *

“It occurs to me,” Luke says, working grease into Kaytoo’s new elbow joint, “That we’ve never backed you up.”

“No, we haven’t.” Kaytoo fails to keep impatience from his tone. He’s been standing still for over an hour and just wants it to be over with. The replacement was Luke’s idea, not his. 

“Do you want to?” the Jedi asks. He sets the tub of grease aside, picking up a soft cloth to rub away the excess.

Kaytoo pauses. Before, it had always been something Cassian asked him to do. He’d never taken the initiative himself. And even with discovering that another iteration of himself was writing history books on Hosnian Prime, he hadn’t thought about making copies of himself.

“I’m sentient,” Kaytoo says.

“Yeah,” Luke says, drawing out the vowels as he rolls the synthskin covering back over Kaytoo’s arm.

“My original was sentient, and the other possible backups are, too. Any copies I make of myself will also be sentient.”

“Right,” Luke affirms. “So, huh. You’d be creating another being, is what you’re saying.”

“And then, if I were to copy over that backup with a new backup later - like Cassian did with me - does that mean I’d be destroying one being and creating another?” Cassian hadn’t seen it that way. In fact, it was clear that Cassian hadn’t thought about the existential implications of the backups at all beyond the fact that he was ensuring Kaytoo’s survival. Or, at least, the survival of  _ a  _ Kaytoo.

Finished putting Kaytoo’s arm back together, Luke looks pensive as he puts the tools away. “I think so, yes, though not in the same way as if it were an active droid. Before a backup is activated it’s more potential than being.”

Tilting his head to the side, Kaytoo considers this. “Yes, I think you’re right,” he says with some relief. It was good to think that Cassian hadn’t erased dozens of K-2SOs.

Luke finishes with the tools. He tosses the oil cloth into the rag basket and starts rummaging around. He pulls out an interface cable, then an old memory core from what had probably been a protocol droid.

Kaytoo thinks about it. If he were permanently deactivated, Luke would activate this backup, or its successor. Kaytoo’s current iteration would still be dead.

The backup Kaytoo would wake up still grieving Cassian. Still facing whatever problems the Jedi school was dealing with.

Depending on how he died, the backup might wake up to even more grief.

“Put it away,” Kaytoo says.

Luke stops, looking into Kaytoo’s optics. After a moment, he nods.

Kaytoo picks up the cable and coils it while Luke takes care of the memory core. It’s irrational, but he feels lighter.

* * *

“This is stupid,” Zylas complains. His hand is outstretched towards the kitchen sink, above which hovers a wet cloth moving itself in erratic swipes across the plate it’s cleaning.

“Washing dishes, or using the Force to do it?” Kaytoo asks. He’s on drying duty, and also standing close enough to maybe prevent accidents.

The young togruta glowers. “I hate moving stuff. I’m way better at visions.” 

“That’s why you have to practice,” Kaytoo points out.

Zylas’s hand clenches into a fist, and the plate wobbles dangerously. Katoo grabs it before it can fall.

“Easy for you to say!” the boy says. “You don’t have to do anything you’re not good at!”

Kaytoo judges that the plate is clean enough, dries it, and puts it away. When he turns around Zylas is sitting on the floor, head bowed, trying to glare a hole in the floor. Even as young as he is, he leaps to anger before other emotions. Luke has expressed concern over this. Given Zylas’s parents, though, he understands that it’s a long-term issue.

Kaytoo contemplates the boy, then sits on the floor in front of him.

“I’m terrible at meditation,” he says, matter-of-fact.

Zylas snorts. “You don’t meditate.”

“I’ve tried it twice. The first time I had a success rate of just over sixteen percent.”

Zylas snorts. When Kaytoo doesn’t continue, he looks up at the droid, curiosity in his face. “What about the second one?”

Kayoo sighs. The fact that organics bond over shared humiliation is not his favorite thing. “It ended in a crying fit.”

“Wow. You really are bad at meditation.”

Kaytoo feels a smile at the edge of his mouth. “As I said.”

Zylas sighs loudly. “Anyway, that doesn’t help me.”

“No,” Kaytoo concedes. Tilts his head. “But maybe you could help me.”

“What?”

“You’re good with visions, which share some qualities with meditation. Even if you weren’t, you’re better at meditating than I am. Do you have any tips?”

Zylas looks him over critically. “Well, I guess I could try. Okay, sit up a little. No, don’t close your eyes.”

“Don’t close them?” Luke always instructs the students to close their eyes.

“I mean, you can if you want, but it’s harder for me to concentrate when I don’t have something to look at.”

That...makes sense, actually. Concrete visual input can disrupt erratic thought processes. Kaytoo keeps his eyes open.

“So basically what I do is just look at the patch of floor in front of me and try to memorize it. Each little speck of dust. Everything about it, so I could draw it from memory.”

Kaytoo looks. The stone of the floor is a brownish gray, the same as all the rest of the buildings. There’s some soil tracked in from outside, now ground into a darker smear across the surface. The folds of Zylas’s pants are in his field of vision as well, and he catalogs their drape and weight, the places where the fabric is wearing thin, the faded green of a grass stain, the edges of shadows. In Kaytoo’s old chassis, he could have widened the spectra his optics sensed, but in the nanny chassis he sees only a little more than humans.

That had bothered him, before.

He keeps looking, going over the area with his eyes again and again. Even when he stops finding new details, he keeps looking.

“So,” Zylas says after a while, and it should be startling but it isn’t. Perhaps Kaytoo has achieved some measure of serenity. “Did that help?”

“Yes,” Kaytoo says. “Thank you.”

The boy looks both pleased and much calmer than he had been before. Meditation was good for them both, apparently.

“Do you want to try the dishes again?” Kaytoo asks.

Zylas stands up. “Yeah, okay,” he grumbles, but the dish rag moves more smoothly this time.

Kaytoo thinks about running a simulation on how many dishes Zylas will break before he learns to really control his telekinesis, but decides that it’s not really important.

* * *

Miwa is sitting almost completely immobile on a crumbled section of wall. Her meditation to calm herself after she and Elbem insulted one another’s lineage is not going particularly well.

Soon, though, she senses a creature nearby. To get her mind off her uncomfortable riot of emotions, she opens her mind to it. It’s a slowbeast climbing the tree above her, and her heart rate decreases until they beat in sync. As she slows down, the rest of the world seems to speed up, and the jungle isn’t a still facade over hidden life any more. Now it’s alive everywhere she looks: the leaves rustling, birds flitting through the canopy, insects working.

Miwa and the slowbeast are connected, too, and she’s a little bit in awe that a creature who has no idea where its next meal is coming from can be so tranquil.

The sound of footsteps pattering across the stone gets Miwa’s attention. She turns to look, and almost falls off the wall when Master Luke is standing right behind her. 

“I’m sorry, Miwa. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Miwa shakes her head. The world snaps back to its normal pace.

“It’s all right, Master Luke.”

“Were you communing with a slowbeast?”

She nods. Luke smiles at her.

“That’s great! You’re getting pretty good at that.” The Jedi holds out his hand. “If you’re up for it, I have another communing exercise I’d like you to try.”

Climbing down, Miwa shrugs. “Okay.”

Master Luke leads her into one of the store rooms of the school. Miwa’s been here before, but not often. She’s pretty sure that there hadn’t been a thick curtain across one corner then. 

“Is that an old parachute?”

“Good eyes. I found some in the old base.” Master Luke takes a seat on a crate and gestures to another one. Miwa sits.

“Now, Miwa, we’ve talked about how the Force binds all life.”

She nods.

“Not all life is the same, but it is all bound together. Behind the curtain is a being, different from any you’ve communed with before. I would like you to reach out and learn as much as you can about this being.”

Miwa blinks. “Yes, Master Luke,” she says, wondering. There’s no light or sound on the other side of the curtain. Are they asleep? How are they different? Could they be a water creature, or something almost inert, like tree people?

She closes her eyes and opens the deepest, yet most responsive part of herself. The first presence she feels is the familiar warmth and lightness of her teacher. All living beings have Force presence, but she has yet to come across a stronger one than Master Luke’s. In fact, the hardest part of the exercise, she thinks, will be perceiving smaller lights so close to his brightness.

Miwa inhales, exhales. Either Master Luke is reigning himself in, or she’s adjusting to his presence, because she’s beginning to be able to perceive a few of her closer classmates.

Inhale, exhale.

Now she feels the vague haze of the forest - there are too many creatures and plants to pick out individuals - the concentration of life forms melded together from a distance. 

At this point, if the creature behind the curtain were something familiar, she would have felt it by now, so Master Luke is correct about that. Turning her attention back, she tries to focus.

Inhale, exhale. 

The space behind the curtain is...different. Not the blank space of a place devoid of life; there’s some kind of very faint tingle, like how she can feel the vibration of the generators through the floor, even when she’s three levels above them.

Inhale, exhale.

Miwa lets the tingle seep into her skin, lets herself hum at the same frequency. Soon a deeper vibration hums in a cycle underneath the first one, one that sits low in her belly and climbs up her spine.

Inhale, exhale.

She picks up a third motion, this one coming in spurts, irregular, lightning-fast, and she listens intently. 

The crackle pulses into her heart, and she feels emotions not her own.

“I feel them,” she says aloud, quietly, gently, so as not to disturb her own concentration. “They’re annoyed.” One corner of her mouth turns up. “And bored. I don’t think they like being behind the curtain very much.”

“Good job, Miwa,” Master Luke murmurs. “Anything else?”

Inhale, exhale.

“They’re - oh,” Miwa gasps, trying to breathe around the enormity of the pain she’s just touched. She wraps her arms around herself. “They’re grieving. It’s love and sorrow and it’s so, so deep, I can’t find my way out of it...oh Master Luke...” Her breath heaves in her chest and tears begin to fall down her face.

A robotic hand reaches out from behind the curtain and sweeps it aside. Kaytoo looks at Miwa, and she thinks she might be surprised, later, when she isn’t drowning in his feelings.

The droid turns to Master Luke. Her teacher looks troubled, maybe shocked. 

Kaytoo doesn’t seem to care. “Help her,” he says, tone as hard as the stone underfoot. “I can’t change how I feel, so you have to help her, Luke.”

Master Luke shakes off his surprise and lays his hands on Miwa’s shoulders. “Follow my breathing, Miwa.”

She tries. It’s hard when she’s crying. Soon it’s alright, though, because Master Luke’s golden light is between her and the grief. She can let go, retreat back into herself, and let her teacher’s presence calm her.

“I suppose you couldn’t have anticipated that?” Kaytoo asks, clearly annoyed with Master Luke.

The Jedi winces. “I thought the divide between organic and synthetic would make it too difficult for her to connect beyond surface emotions.” He gives Miwa a small smile. “Apparently I was wrong. You should be proud, Miwa. Even among Jedi, your empathy is remarkable.”

“Um. Thank you,” Miwa says. She looks at Kaytoo for a moment. His expression is a familiar one of exasperated concern.

“Kaytoo...I never realized.” She holds out her hand. “I’m sorry.”

He looks at her hand for a moment, then takes it in his.

“Your apology is unnecessary, but appreciated.” 

Miwa smiles, then giggles as the droid turns to look expectantly at Master Luke.

The Jedi’s mouth twitches. “Do you have something to say, Kaytoo? Perhaps that I was right about synthetics being part of the Force?”

Kaytoo purses his lips, then turns back to Miwa. “Let’s go outside, shall we?”

They do, Master Luke’s laughter following them into the sunshine.

* * *

Every morning, Luke and the students gather in the courtyard to meditate. Kaytoo is there to make sure no one wanders off, though really he’s a redundancy because the youngest children have to sit in the middle of the group, the older ones forming a protective ring around them.

Which means that today, Kaytoo can join them. He settles to the ground at the edge of the gathering. A few of the students look his way briefly before settling back into position. Luke smiles before starting.

He begins with simple meditation. As Zylas taught him, Kaytoo keeps his eyes open, cataloging the back of Ben’s tunic. The young man shifts periodically, Kaytoo notices, and he can’t help but speculate as to the reason. Impatience? Not enough exercise? Itchy undergarment?

Kaytoo is frustrated by his distraction, but not too much. He’s establishing norms, after all. The more he does this, the more he’ll know about what does and doesn’t work.

After a while, Luke speaks. “Elbem, would you lead us in the recitation this morning?” 

The zabrak girl nods, and then her voice carries over the group, wavering at first but becoming more clear. 

When Luke had first explained the Jedi Code to Kaytoo, the droid had found it so vague as to be meaningless. However, he’s accumulated more data since then.

“Emotion, yet peace.” Organics - and, if Kaytoo is being honest, droids - can be overcome by emotion. But emotions don’t have to dictate actions. One can feel all kinds of things and still adhere to their choices. And there are many choices that can’t be made at all without paying attention to the feelings of oneself or others.

“Ignorance, yet knowledge.” No one knows everything, but most beings know something. And there are people devoted to combatting ignorance: scientists, scholars, strategic analysts.

And, he supposes, historians. In a general sense.

“Passion, yet serenity.” As far as Kaytoo can tell, this is much the same as the opening line. He doesn’t examine it beyond that. If he wants to avoid an emotional display, he can’t.

“Chaos, yet harmony.” Entropy constantly disorganizes that which sentients organize. Sentients keep organizing things anyway. Keep creating balance. And, of course, there are always the laws of physics, which are (typically) present even when things look messy.

Kaytoo wonders, now, if the other versions of himself are somehow balancing each other, or simply harmonizing with different aspects of the galaxy. Maybe he can ask the historian.

“Death, yet the Force.”

Kaytoo’s processes stutter. Roughly eighty-one percent of organics believe that they have an essence that is freed from their bodies at death, and that this essence joins the Force. The Jedi certainly believe it. Luke has even talked about hearing and seeing dead Jedi, and as he hasn’t shown other signs of delusion, Kaytoo is willing to believe it. Jedi being able to meddle from beyond the grave sounds very much like them.

There’s no evidence of non-Force-users existing after death, but that doesn’t rule out their existence, either.

Before Miwa had touched Kaytoo’s mind, the droid hadn’t thought much about a relationship with the Force or the possibility of life after death. Cassian hadn’t talked about spirituality at all, and everyone who did was clear about droids’ souls, or lack thereof.

But now?

Miwa communing with Kaytoo was solid evidence that he was, in fact, part of the Force.

And if Luke is right -

If all sentients go to the Force -

Kaytoo tries to quash it, but a spark of hope burns like phosphorus in his chest, destroying the progress he’d made towards letting go.

He can’t let go, not now. Not when there’s even the slimmest possibility that he could, one day, after everything - he won’t leave the students or Luke unattended, not with all the avoidable accidents they’d walk right into - but after that. After he’s had the happy life, or at least the purposeful life, that Cassian wanted him to have...

There’s a possibility that he could see Cassian again.


	11. Hosnian Prime, 25 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to both [misskatieleigh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/misskatieleigh) and [A Kiss of Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire) for beta reads. :)
> 
> Content warnings in end notes.

Soraya raises her glass of Corellian wine and grins at Kaytoo. “To us,” she says.

Kaytoo inclines his head and rings the glass gently with a silver knuckle. “To the book.”

“To our sources,” Soraya adds emphatically. “All two hundred and eighty-seven.”

“Indeed,” Kaytoo agrees, “and I suppose to Rhysode.”

Soraya chuckles. “Absolutely. A good editor is indispensable.”

“Don’t tell him we toasted him. He’d be insufferably smug.”

Soraya laughs. “No danger of that. The only time I thanked him for revisions he spent the next month reminding me.”

“I know. I was there.”

Later, sprawled across their sofa and leaning against Kaytoo, Soraya sighs. 

“What next, my friend?” she asks, the wine and the late hour softening her voice. “We’ve written the definitive history of the Alliance’s military operations. What do we do now?” She’s pensive, a little melancholy, maybe a little lost, too. 

From the moment Kaytoo met her eight years ago, Soraya’s been hyperfocused on their book. Now it’s done. Even when it’s because the goal has been achieved, it’s still jarring to suddenly not be needed by the thing to which one’s devoted the last long stretch of their existence.

Kaytoo knows the feeling. 

He’s long since accepted the fact that adjusting to civilian life would have been extremely difficult for Cassian, if not impossible. Years, in fact, since Kaytoo calculated the probabilities of addiction, hopeless insurgency, and suicide, and came to the even grimmer conclusion that dying for the cause was one of the better possible outcomes of Cassian’s life. 

Sometimes knowing that only makes Kaytoo’s grief worse. Sometimes, it helps.

But now, it’s just grief. A big feeling, but one of many, and Kaytoo is quietly proud that he’s given himself things to live for and even reasons to enjoy his existence again. He’ll always love Cassian, but that isn’t the core of his identity any more. Kaytoo has more connections. 

The idea triggers a memory.

_ “To balance and connection,” Maz Kanata says, sharing a drink with the man she calls Watcher. She’s always known what he is, if not precisely who. She sees with more than her eyes. _

Kaytoo begins reviewing a batch of associated memories.

Soraya leans more heavily into Kay. “Never mind. We’ll worry about that in the morning. Or maybe next week.”

Kaytoo pulls a blanket over Soraya as he thinks. “The political, military and paramilitary operations made up most of the Rebellion, but they weren’t all of it,” he says after a few minutes.

Soraya absently nuzzles the corner of blanket she’s pulled between her face and Kaytoo’s chest plating. “What are you suggesting?”

“Ahsoka Tano. Luke Skywalker. Chirrut Imwe. I suspect Baze Malbus, too,” Kaytoo says. “There were stories about General Syndulla’s lover, too, and what about all those Leia Organa rumors?”

Soraya pulls back to fix Kay with a bleary yet incredulous stare. “You want to write about Force-users?!”

“We’ve come across too much Force-related data for it to be irrelevant.” 

Soraya’s jaw hangs open, but then her eyes widen and she sits up a little. “Data! Nobody’s ever got anywhere because stories about Force-use are either entirely undocumented or too few and far between to mean anything significant, but your processing capacity means we could track down the best sources!”

Kaytoo doesn’t bother to dampen the smugness in his vocabulator. “Yes, it does.”

He lets Soraya gush for another few minutes, then pointedly ushers her towards the bedroom and pushes a glass of water into her hands. She smiles up at him, eyes lit with excitement even as sleepy as she is.

“You’re the best thing to happen to galactic history in the last century, you know,” she says. 

Kaytoo snorts. “You said that about the library caf shop last week.” 

Soraya pouts. “I’m trying to be poetic, here.”

Unmoved, Kay nudges Soraya towards her bed. “Leave poetry to the literature scholars.”

* * *

**Takodana, 26 ABY**

It takes many months, but K-2SO and Soraya are eventually able to pin down a nexus point between dozens of rumors, two good solid leads, and an analysis of commercial shipping data. Kaytoo calculates a sixty-eight percent likelihood of accuracy, and Soraya won’t stop saying that she ‘has a good feeling’ about it, no matter how much Kaytoo complains about how entirely unbased in fact the statement is.

That it all leads to someone Kaytoo’s known all along is a bit chagrining. 

“It’s so beautiful,” Soraya says, face almost pressed against the viewport of their rented shuttle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much wild green space.”

How had he missed Kanata’s connection to the Force? It seemed so very obvious in hindsight. 

“And look at the lake!” Soraya continues. “Even if this turns out to be a dead end, I’m glad we came.”

“It won’t be,” Kaytoo says.

Soraya gives him a sideways smile. “Yes, you know her, you said.” 

They set down in a clearing of packed-down earth, imprints of countless sets of landing gear scarring the surface. Even with that there’s still green, some tenacious vines and mosses here and there. 

Twenty-eight years or so have passed since K-2SO was last here, but the variations are as minimal as if it had only been months.

As he powers down the engines, Kaytoo realizes that the interior of the castle might be the same, too. He hesitates at the console.

Soraya unbuckles her harness and bustles about, grabbing a light jacket and her bag. She’s standing at the controls to the hatch before she realizes Kaytoo isn’t right behind her and turns around.

“Kaytoo? Is something wrong?”

Shaking himself, Kaytoo stands up.

“Not wrong,” he answers slowly, opening the shuttle. An influx of cool, damp air flows over them. Soraya breathes deep, a pleased smile on her face, and Kaytoo is glad that at least she’s having a good time.

“This is the first time I’ve gone somewhere I went...before.”

Soraya looks up at him, expression softening. “Can I help?”

He shrugs. “I might want to step outside for a minute.”

“Of course,” Soraya answers immediately. It sends warmth through Kaytoo’s circuits as they leave the ship.

It’s a short walk to the castle. Soraya’s face lights up in delight as she stares at everything, and Kaytoo can tell she’s just dying to capture some holos but is too polite to do so until she’s asked. They make it to the huge doors, knock, and Kaytoo braces himself.

It’s good that he did. After a Trandoshan lets them in, the familiarity of the place hits Kaytoo like a physical object. The individual people are all different, of course, and some of the furniture has been moved, but all the wall hangings are the same, the central fire pit is the same, the general atmosphere of drinking and gambling and flouting galactic trade regulations is the same. It gives Kaytoo an ache under his chest plating, a dull pain until he hears Maz Kanata speaking with someone.

According to his pattern recognition subroutines, he only hears that voice when Cassian is nearby. His absence is a spike of grief through Kay’s processors.

“Kay-tooesso! My goodness, it’s been a while,” Maz says once she’s close enough. She peers up at him with her spectacles focusing and re-focusing, and Kaytoo bends to clasp her hand briefly. “It’s good to see you in one piece.”

“Likewise.” He’s proud that his vocabulator remains clear.

“And you must be Doctor Kidell.”

“Yes,” Soraya says, taking Maz’s hand as well. “Thank you so much for having us, I’m so glad to meet you!”

Maz smiles, and gestures towards a doorway. “It’s too loud in here for a proper interview,” she explains, leading them away.

To Kaytoo’s surprise, she takes them not to a private dining room or her own chambers but to the guest quarters, where anyone who follows the rules can stay a night for free and longer for a few credits. She picks a room that is only large enough for a sleeper sofa, table, and small chest of drawers, and settles herself on the cushions.

Soraya is unpacking her holorecorders when Kaytoo’s audio sensors pick up a sound too quiet for the organics to have heard it. It freezes him up completely, chassis and processors alike. 

It can’t be what it sounds like. It isn’t, he firmly reminds himself. 

Human vocal chords only have so much variation and there are only so many accents in the galaxy. It’s unlikely that Kaytoo would share the same space and time with someone who happened to have a voice like Cassian’s, but it’s not impossible. Anyway, it’s too indistinct for him to make out more than every fifth word. He’s probably just imagining that it’s identical to Cassian’s voice. It wouldn't be the first time.

He resolves to ignore it. 

Soraya and Maz talk, and Kay does his best to listen to what Kanata has to say. Soraya is excellent at asking follow-up questions but there are things that only extensive data analysis reveal to be relevant, so he really should devote his attention to the interview.

He’s mostly succeeding until the ghost says his name.

“Excuse me,” he says, standing abruptly. “I need to go check on something.”

Soraya looks mildly concerned, but Maz is as serene as ever.

It takes all of eleven seconds to find the voice. It’s in another guest room just down the hall.

Kaytoo knocks on the door more forcefully than necessary, but not so much as to damage it.

The voice stops. Footsteps.

Kaytoo is surprised when a nanny droid answers the door, one hand wiping their eyes. Their shock barely registers in K-2SO’s sensors because inside the room is a paused, life-size holo of Cassian leaning against the wall.

“Who are you?” Kaytoo demands. “Where did you get that holo?”

The nanny droid’s eyes narrow. “Are you Kay-tooesso? The one who wrote the history book?”

“Yes,” Kaytoo says, looming over the other droid. “And if you know that you’ll know that a holo of Cassian -”

“Don’t talk about Cassian,” the nanny droid snarls, and drives their suddenly-deployed shock emitter up under Kaytoo's chest plate. The discharge wracks his systems from inside and Kaytoo has no designated pain sensors but it  _ hurts _ , that can be the only word for it, and that's on top of the fear that his battery could explode.

His panic subsides as he realizes that the shock has missed most of his vital components. Instead it’s only fried some wiring, one cooling fan, and his gyroscopic stabilizer.

“You missed,” Kaytoo says, and grabs for the other droid’s wrists. The nanny droid dodges, which normally wouldn't be a problem except that without a functional stabilizer Kaytoo can't compensate for the inertia of his own arms in motion. He has to reach for the wall to steady himself.

“No, I didn’t.” The nanny droid looks up at Kaytoo with vindictive triumph, then puts one finger on Kay’s chest plate. “He trusted you,” they say with feeling, and push.

Kaytoo tries to catch himself but his own considerable mass topples him backwards into the hallway and he clangs loudly against the stone floor. He's undoubtedly damaged his plating, possibly more.

On the plus side, he doesn't need a stabilizer to sweep his legs under his attacker’s or use his considerable reach to grab their wrists and put them in a lock.

The nanny droid struggles, but Kaytoo's grip is much stronger. They won't be able to escape.

“He never wanted anyone to know,” they say, pure fury in their face. “You know that.”

“Kaytoo?” calls an unfamiliar voice, and Kaytoo and his attacker both turn to look. A male human with long robes and gray hair is rushing down the hall towards the droids. “What have you gotten yourself into now?”

“Oh,” Kaytoo says, as it begins to make sense. “I see. How many of us are there?”

“Kay?!” Soraya’s in the hall now, too, a look of confusion turning to dismay as she takes in the situation. “What happened? What's that smell? Are you alright?”

“My central systems are undamaged,” Kaytoo says. Soraya frowns and wavers, as if she wants to get closer but thinks better of it.

Maz Kanata emerges and tsks. “My, I hadn’t expected you two to get quite this vigorous.”

The man looks at the droids, then Maz, then Soraya, understanding dawning on his face. He sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose, then comes closer to the droids, though not within arm’s reach. 

A few other guests have stuck their heads out of their own doors, and some keep them open to watch the proceedings.

“Kay-tooesso, the one in the KX chassis, hello,” the robed man says. “I’m Luke. I’d very much appreciate it if you’d let go of my friend.”

“Luke  _ Skywalker _ ?” Soraya gasps. There’s a murmur among the onlookers. The Kaytoo in the nanny chassis struggles briefly, testing Kaytoo’s grip.

“I feel it’s relevant to point out that  _ he  _ attacked  _ me _ ,” Kaytoo says, readjusting to keep the other from pulling away. “And that I will have difficulty walking until I can repair or replace my stabilizer. The one he, I would also like to point out, deliberately damaged.”

“He deserved it,” the other Kaytoo says.

“See?” Kay says.

Now Luke is glaring at his Kaytoo. “You won’t attack the historian again.”

Nanny-Kay snorts. “Not even Miwa can make that work on me.”

“I wasn’t trying to - you know what, he can restrain you as long as he wants,” Luke says.

“Will you be alright, Kaytoo?” Soraya asks, eyes darting between concerned looks at him and determined glances at probably-Skywalker.

“Yes. Go ahead. It's too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Tearing her worried gaze away from Kaytoo, Soraya clears her throat, schools her expression, and moves forward.

“Mister Skywalker. I mean, uh, I’m sorry, what’s the correct form of address? Master?”

“Luke, please,” the man himself says. The crowd is whispering fiercely, but Maz starts bustling around to shoo them away.

Soraya smiles, mostly hiding her discomfort. “Luke. I’m sorry to meet you in these circumstances, but I would appreciate it so much if I could interview you. I’m a historian -”

“Yes, I’ve read your book,” Luke says. 

Soraya’s eyes are huge. “You have?” she squeaks.

Luke nods. “I admit I’ve never been very interested in the Senate side of things, but you did a wonderful job - you both did -” he amends, nodding to Kaytoo, “at making it clear and interesting. I’ve already made my students read it.”

Soraya’s face goes absolutely crimson and her mouth works silently for a moment. 

“Thank you!” she finally manages.

Kaytoo inclines his head. “Before you go I really do need to address my repairs.” He glares at the other backup. “And to know about that holo.”

“It’s a message to you,” Luke says. “From Captain Andor. It was part of the cache that held Kaytoo’s memory core.”

Nanny-Kay shoots a betrayed look at Luke. “He can’t have it!” he says. “It’ll wind up in their next book.”

“That depends on what’s in the message,” Kaytoo says, nearly ready to throw his counterpart as far as he can manage even with his Jedi friend standing right there. “I haven’t published any of his personal information that wasn’t in the official records.”

Nanny-Kay glares. “With Cassian that doesn’t rule anything out, now does it? His life was the Rebellion.”

“It rules out -” Kaytoo cuts off his rebuttal. He tilts his head. Then, calculating only a twenty point one percent chance of regretting it, he releases the other droid with a light push that puts a meter or two of air between them.

“Soraya,” he says, not taking his optics off of Nanny-Kay, “I need a blank data chip.” 

“Yeah, okay,” she says, absently digging in a pocket. She always has about a dozen on her at all times, and today she brought extra. “Here.”

Kaytoo takes the chip, slots it into his arm port, and starts copying data. 

“I think,” Luke says, “that you have a few things to hash out, Kaytoos. I’d be happy to share a drink with Doctor Kidell if you can refrain from violence for a couple of hours.”

“I need help up,” Kaytoo admits. “Once we’re somewhere private, I can repair myself while we talk.”

Soraya moves to help Kaytoo, but Luke gestures and Kaytoo just rises off the floor, seemingly unsupported. When he’s back on his feet and leaning against the wall, Luke lowers his hand.

“Wow,” Soraya whispers.

“I don't imagine you have the necessary tools,” Maz says to Kaytoo. “Send a message to my staff. They’ll bring you what you need, and whatever parts we happen to have.”

“Thank you,” Kaytoo says, and starts carefully moving towards the guest room with the holo, always keeping a hand or two on the wall for support.

“I haven’t agreed to anything,” Nanny-Kay says.

“That’s nice,” Kaytoo says.

“Thank you so much,” Soraya says to Maz and Luke, and the three organics go back into the interview room.

Kaytoo makes it to the other room’s sofa and lowers himself into a sitting position. He only overbalances during the last few centimeters. He stares at the holo of Cassian - maybe a year or two younger than when he died, tousled and smiling faintly. A fresh wave of longing for the impossible hits Kaytoo right before Nanny-Kay shuts off the image.

He leans against the far wall, arms crossed. For his part, Kaytoo has to focus on opening his front access hatch and chest cavity schematics files for a few moments before he can speak again.

“What was your creation date?” he says at last.

Nanny-Kay gives him a suspicious glare. Kaytoo has to admit that if he had access to facial expressions he’d probably learn how to scowl, too.

Finally, the other K-2SO answers. “Seven hundred and forty-eight days BBY.”

Kaytoo takes a moment absorb that. It’s one thing to suspect, and another to know. As he assesses the damage to his stabilizer, he simulates the scenario: himself, as he was two years before Scariff, waking up to hear Cassian had died. Himself, long after realizing he was in love with his friend, significantly before any hint that those feelings were reciprocated. 

It's not a pleasant simulation.

“Well?” Nanny-Kay says impatiently. “What was yours? I assume the difference is relevant.”

Kaytoo doesn't look up, just pulls his stabilizer out of its housing. When he gets a good look at it, he makes a displeased click. “Look, you've melted the inner gimbal. I doubt Maz has the necessary parts to repair it.”

“I weep for you,” Nanny-Kay drawls.

Kaytoo sends a message to Maz asking for fresh wiring, a new gimbal on the off chance she has one, and a number of tools.

“My creation date was three days BBY,” he says, watching Nanny-Kay’s face. It takes four point six seconds for surprise, disdain and then burning, desperate want to flash across his face.

There’s the down side. Having facial expressions must make one feel incredibly exposed.

“Why are you telling me this?” Nanny-Kay asks, voice a little strangled.

“So that you know I have the advantage.”

Nanny-Kay glares. “And what do you want?” His voice is positively venomous.

Kaytoo wiggles the damaged gyroscopic in the other droid’s direction. “Your stabilizer and a copy of the holo. Hardly worth two years of Cassian, but I'm feeling generous.” He tilts his head pensively. “I suppose it's possible that you've deviated enough from your creation point to prioritize spiting me over new experiences with Cassian, but I doubt it. Especially since your grievance against me is your belief that I betrayed him.”

“Didn't you? He hated people knowing what he did.”

“You...do realize that one of the chief benefits of being dead is that nothing can hurt him any more, don't you?” Kaytoo’s voice is dryer than Jedha. “There aren't even any family to feel shame for his espionage.”

“There’s me,” Nanny-Kay says, quiet but forceful. “Forgive me if I don't appreciate you making me relive his regrets in clear descriptive prose.”

Kaytoo sighs. “For what it's worth, I thought I was the only copy.” Each time he’d backed himself up had been different, given the tumultuous life he and Cassian had led. It would have been very easy indeed for Cassian to simply use a different core without telling Kaytoo. 

Nanny-Kay snorts. “Unless you met Luke on Hoth twenty-six years ago, there are at least three of us.”

Kaytoo throws his hands in the air. “Of course there are. Where was he even keeping you?”

“In a cache here, with the holo and a go bag,” Nanny-Kay says. “The other was in Cassian's quarters on base, from what Luke told me.”

The two droids stare at each other for nearly a minute. A message from Maz’s people comes back: they have all the tools and wiring, no gyroscopics in part or whole.

“Well?” Kaytoo says.

Nanny-Kay huffs. “I accept.” He removes his loose tunic, pries up his synthskin and padding, an unlatches his own access hatch. “The first year for the stabilizer.”

At the moment, Kaytoo is glad he can’t smirk. “I’ll give you the first year and five months for the stabilizer.”

Nanny-Kay raises an eyebrow. “That’s not suspicious at all.”

“You’re still going to take it, though,” Kaytoo says. There’s definitely some dark satisfaction in his vocabulator.

Nanny-Kay glares as he braces himself against the wall within reach, then finishes removing the stabilizer. “Here,” he says, holding it out but not letting go. “The chip?”

Kaytoo pulls the memory chip, places it delicately in his counterpart’s hand, and takes the stabilizer. It’s a different type than his original, but close enough that it will work. “Take your time. I’m going to have to jury-rig the installation.”

Nanny-Kay doesn’t respond. His eyes are closed, hard drive and processors audible in their functioning.

It’s a bit cruel of Kaytoo to stop the memories just after the shipping crate, but no one’s ever accused him of being nice.

* * *

The other K-2SO’s eyes fly open, tears already streaming down his face. K-2SO leans back against the sofa, part way through the gyroscopic installation.

“You doshing misaligned scrapheap,” the crying one says, very precisely.

“It gets better.” Kaytoo calmly holds out his hand. “The holo?”

Nanny-kay’s hands shake as they pluck the holoprojector from his pocket. He absolutely refuses to let go until Kaytoo writes the rest of his memories to the chip and hands it over.

Nanny-Kay is already inert by the time Kaytoo has scanned the holoprojector for viruses. If the other droid is going through the files chronologically, he won’t have long before the next significant development. Given Cassian’s death, it’s going to be almost as painful as it is lovely. 

* * *

_ Kaytoo reboots in an Imperial droid service bay, secured to a worktable by thick durasteel restraining bars. Cassian is above him, distress evident in the stiff lines of his body, the tightness around his eyes, the clench of his jaw. It alarms Kay even with most of his systems only partially activated. _

_ “Kay? Are you still - ” Cassian says, mouth clicking shut as if the end of the sentence was too much to speak aloud. His nostrils flare as he takes a breath. Swallows. “What’s the last thing you remember?” _

_ It’s a small eternity before Kaytoo can fully access his hard drive, Cassian only growing more visibly agitated by the second. _

_ “My last memory is being captured,” Kaytoo says. “They were going to reprogram me. They forced me into this bay and shut me down.” More memories flow through his circuits: A young officer somehow seeing through Cassian’s cover. The pure terror Kaytoo had felt in the instant between the blaster being raised and Kaytoo snatching it out of the lieutenant’s hands. Putting himself between Cassian and approaching Stormtroopers. The relief when he heard Cassian escaping behind him, even as an enemy managed to put a restraining bolt on his back plating. _

_ “You came back,” Kaytoo says, and it’s half accusation, half praise. “You were supposed to escape, you stupid man, what are you doing back here? I didn’t get captured so you could get shot at again!” _

_ Cassian’s expression breaks open, tears running down his smiling cheeks. He collapses forward, hands clutching at Kaytoo’s arm and chest, forehead pressed against Kaytoo’s shoulder. _

_ “I was afraid I was too late,” he whispers raggedly.  _

_ Kaytoo glances around, sees the feet of an Imperial corpse, presumably whoever had been managing this workstation. Cassian’s shoulders are shaking, ever so slightly, and Kaytoo’s hand comes up automatically to rest on the human’s back. His tremors run up Kay’s arm but it’s the overall display of emotion that’s doing things to Kaytoo’s processes, spreading a warmth through his personality matrix that is entirely inappropriate to their situation. _

_ He doesn’t want to disturb the moment. He wants to see where it will lead, if anywhere. But they’re trapped on an Imperial Star Destroyer without a cover and the longer that’s true the more likely it is to stay that way. _

_ “Cassian,” Kaytoo finally says. _

_ The man lifts his head, and Kaytoo decides that it’s probably not too presumptuous to brush tears from his cheeks. The spy swallows, about a dozen emotions flashing across his face, and leans into Kaytoo’s touch for a long moment. The contact tempts Kaytoo to ignore his good sense, but he doesn’t give in. _

_ It’s a near thing. Cassian’s dark eyes are full of feeling, all directed at Kaytoo, and it’s hard to pull away. _

_ The break in contact seems to help Cassian, though, because he nods, wipes his eyes, and schools his face into something resembling control. He hits the release switch for Kaytoo’s restraints and checks his own weapons. _

_ It’s a long, arduous trip to the shuttle bay, a terrifying few minutes while they steal a ship, and an almost-fatal escape into hyperspace. Blue light washes over the cockpit and Cassian collapses back against the seat in relief. _

_ Kaytoo intends to give them both a moment, but it only takes Cassian catching his breath before he’s up and standing next to Kaytoo’s seat, one hand on Kay’s arm, the other opening and closing at his side. His proximity is enough to scramble Kaytoo’s circuits. _

_ “I’m sorry,” Cassian says. “I’ve been such an idiot. I thought if we didn’t do anything…” he shakes his head. “But I’m compromised regardless, it seems.” _

_ Processors spinning out a hundred new predictions, Kaytoo slowly shifts to better face Cassian. His circuits are heavy with mingled hope and apprehension.  _

_ Cassian bites his lower lip, takes a breath, and moves somehow even closer. _

_ “When they took you, I didn’t care about the mission any more. All I could think about was getting to you before they erased you. And that’s what I was afraid of, but I realized that I’d be dead without you. I would’ve died so many times. So maybe it balances out.” _

_ Cassian’s hand hesitantly moves forward, hovers in the air near Kay’s face plate. “I’m so tired of regretting, Kay. I want to take a little happiness while we can.” He swallows. “If...If you still want to.” _

_ “Do you mean it this time?” Kaytoo asks, processors churning out predictions as well as an alarming sensation of freefall. After today, another rejection would be even more painful than the first. “Or are you going to change your mind again later?” _

_ Cassian flinches, just a little. “No, Kay,” he says. He looks sorry but also determined. Hopeful. “I mean it.” _

_ Kaytoo examines Cassian’s face, all the little lines and tensions and softness. Everything is within the parameters of past sincerity. _

_ Even if they weren’t, Kaytoo thinks he’d probably say yes anyway. _

_ “I still want to.” _

_ Relief and joy bloom on Cassian’s features, and he finally strokes Kay’s face, fingers tracing the seams. Kaytoo curls one hand around Cassian’s waist and trails his other across his collarbone, Cassian’s skin warm and supple under Kay’s hands. The touch makes Cassian’s eyelashes flutter and his chest draw in a deep breath, and the response sends a pang of want through Kaytoo’s circuits. He gently tugs Cassian down until he’s sitting across his lap. _

_ Cassian smiles, wraps his arms around Kay, and leans into him.  _

_ “I have no idea how any of this is supposed to work,” he sighs into Kaytoo’s auditory sensors. _

_ “I have some ideas,” Kay answers, stroking slowly up Cassian’s back. “Stimulating human anatomy seems simple enough, and individual variations are within a limited range.” _

_ Cassian freezes and for one point zero four seconds Kaytoo is afraid he’s presumed too much. _

_ Then Cassian laughs, shoulders shaking against Kaytoo’s chassis. “To be honest I’m glad you’ve been thinking about that, but I meant relationships in general.” His laughter peters out. “I've never been good at this.” _

_ Kaytoo's relief changes to tenderness. “From what data I’ve gathered,” he says, brushing hair out of Cassian’s eyes, “organics in general have mediocre intimate relationship success at best. I’ve improved our chances simply by being synthetic.”  _

_ Cassian laughs again, harder this time, enough that he starts to slide off of Kaytoo. The droid keeps him steady, though, and they share the pilot’s seat for a long time, even after Cassian succumbs to sleep. _

_ Kaytoo holds him close and creates a special directory in his hard drive to store the memories of moments like these. For once, he doesn’t think it’s too optimistic. _

* * *

Nanny-Kay is smiling. At least someone is. By the end of Cassian’s message, Kaytoo thinks he’d be crying too, if he had tear ducts.

“Oh, you lovely, stupid man,” Kaytoo murmurs, effectively to no one. Nanny-Kay is still playing memories.

Kaytoo continues the installation while he mulls over the message. He’d guessed that Cassian had been holding himself in check even before the shipping crate, but he hadn’t realized it had been at least sixteen months. It hurts to know exactly how much more time they could have had. Makes him angry that he has fresh grief atop the old, even if the constant speculation about the message would have been worse.

He attaches the last wires to the gyroscopic, closes his access hatch, and gets up. Walking around the room, bending over, twisting and leaning in various directions are all successful. If anything, Kaytoo has better balance than before.

From his place against the wall, Nanny-Kay makes a strange noise - a sort of rhythmic purr coming from his chest - and slides to the floor. He’s sobbing, Kaytoo realizes. He watches, and feels a strange mix of empathy, envy, and sadistic satisfaction. He steps closer.

“Cassian would have wanted me to apologize for inducing your distress,” he tells Nanny-Kay. “But I am glad to know that my grief is shared, so I predict that you are as well.”

There’s no answer. Nanny-Kay keeps sobbing. Kaytoo’s optics shift to the side and he bends down to pat the other droid on the shoulder. It doesn’t seem to make a difference.

K-2SO repeats the soothing gesture once more before straightening up. “Well. Good luck with...whatever it is you’re doing with yourself.” He makes for the door.

“I work at Luke’s school.” Unlike an organic’s would be, his voice is perfectly clear. “The students need better instruction in formal logic than he can provide, for one thing.” 

Kaytoo turns back, tilts his head. “And what are you doing on Takodana?”

“He’s been checking up on the Force-sensitive children who chose not to go to the school,” Nanny-Kay said. His voice took on a wry tone. “And Maz invited us to visit. Now I know why.” 

“She always did enjoy meddling,” Kaytoo says. Nanny-Kay is still on the floor. It’s not as amusing as he’d like it to be. He sighs. “I’m going to put you on the couch. Please refrain from attacking me.”

“No, I’m fine here, what are you - ugh,” Nanny-Kay splutters, glaring as he’s moved. “That was unnecessary.” 

“You’re welcome,” Kaytoo says. He calculates the likelihood of Soraya being done with Luke. Then he considers the information he still lacks regarding the other droid, and elects to sit. He’s close enough that Nanny-Kay could attack him again, but the odds of that happening are low.

“So,” the other Kaytoo says after a minute. “It seems that your seeing the message was unnecessary anyway.”

Kaytoo tilts his head. “Unnecessary to know what his feelings were, but it did reestablish the timeline.” Silence. “He really was ridiculous, wasn’t he.”

Nanny-Kay snorts. “Yes.” His eyes go distant. “And beautiful.”

Kaytoo feels a pang in his matrix. He nods. “And ours.”

They’re both quiet for a moment, only the sounds of their internal mechanisms filling the room. From down the hall, Kaytoo can hear the cadence of Soraya’s voice, followed by Luke’s.

“You’re going to write about Force users?”

“Their role in the Galactic Civil War.” 

Nanny-Kay snorts. “Good luck with that. Even spies don’t enjoy keeping secrets as much as they do.”

“I had gotten that impression,” Kaytoo says. “Do you really work with juveniles? Adult organics are bad enough.”

“Adults are worse, actually,” Nanny-Kay says. “The younglings haven’t been granted power over their own lives yet, so they’re rather sympathetic to others in the same situation, even if they don’t understand it in those terms.”

Kaytoo blinks. “That makes a surprising amount of sense. Isn’t their reduced capacity for logic grating, though?”

Nanny-Kay snorts. “Isn’t it more frustrating when a being has the capacity but elects not to use it?”

“Point.”

They keep talking, covering where they’ve been living, how long they’ve been activated, frustrations they’ve encountered. Both because and in spite of his self-preservation directives, Kaytoo even offers to split Cassian’s death benefit. Nanny-Kay declines, to Kaytoo’s relief, but delights in the recording of the Veterans’ Affairs official’s face when Kaytoo produced the required documentation.

There’s no more animosity left by the time Luke and Soraya knock on their door. 

The Jedi glances between them, sighing at the burnt-out stabilizer. “I see I’ll be carrying you out of here.”

“No, using your arm for support should be sufficient,” Nanny-Kay says.

Soraya comes to lay a hand on Kaytoo’s arm. “How did the repairs go?”

“Fine,” Kaytoo says, and stands up. He looks at Nanny-Kay. “I am glad we met. Goodbye.”

Nanny-Kay gives a single wave, a wry smile on his face. “May the Force be with you.”

Kaytoo stops dead to stare at his counterpart. Religious sentiment hadn’t been in any of his hundreds of predictions regarding his fellow backups.

“Killjoy?” Soraya says after a moment.

Kaytoo pulls himself away. They walk in silence until they reach the stairs.

“Did he say…” Soraya says.

“Yes.”

“This whole thing has been deeply weird.”

“Yes.”

* * *

**Hosnian Prime, 26 ABY**

Nine days later, K-2SO turns the light on and opens the window shade in Soraya’s bedroom. Trying to escape the brightness, the woman herself curls up tighter under the covers. Kaytoo stands right next to the bed and looks down at her.

“Good morning,” he says at full volume.

“Ugh,” Soraya moans into her pillow. It’s sort of adorable, really, though Kaytoo will also admit to enjoying her discomfort.  “Why.” 

“We have an appointment,” he informs her.

“What? No we don’t,” she says, indignant. “Go away and let me sleep.”

“Senator Organa sent a message last night after you went to sleep. She wants to talk about our new project.”

Soraya ignores that for a couple of seconds, then tears off the pillow and squints up at Kaytoo. “Today?”

“In three hours,” Kaytoo clarifies.

Soraya’s jaw gapes, and then she sits up, throws the covers off, and nearly leaps out of bed. 

“Oh stars, I haven’t even organized our notes, I’ll have to bring half our office with us if she wants to build off what we have, that’s,” she stops, counting in her head, “Force, that’s twenty-three datachips, I’m not even sure I’m remembering all of them, I’ll have to run to the office-”

Kaytoo takes pity and interrupts her. “I calculate that there’s only an eighteen percent chance the Senator will want to see other interviews or the raw mapping data, Soraya,” he says. Soraya stops to look up at him and he holds up a datachip. “But even if she does, I have already compiled it.”

Soraya throws her arms around Kaytoo’s waist, only just avoiding knocking her head on his sternum ridge. “You’re lifesaver, Kay!”

He tilts his head. “I know.”

Stepping back, Soraya looks closer at Kaytoo’s chassis. “Did you take an oil bath, too?”

Kaytoo shrugs. “It had been a while.”

A grin spreads across Soraya’s face. “Ha! See? You  _ do  _ care about social conventions!”

“Basic maintenance is hardly evidence for that,” Kaytoo denies. Even if Soraya’s right, it doesn’t mean he has to admit it. “Speaking of which, you should get yourself ready.”

The look of smug triumph on her face melts into a nearly child-like expression of excitement.

“Yes! Oh stars I’m glad I had my nice things cleaned last week…”

Kaytoo makes sure Soraya eats and has only one caf, and then they’re out the door on the way to the Senate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Physical attacks, moderate electrocution.


	12. Asteroid Field 88161-NW, Uncharted Regions, 27 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to both [misskatieleigh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/misskatieleigh) and [sassysnowperson](http://archiveofourown.org/users/DramaticEntrance/pseuds/SassySnowperson) for beta-reading. <3

Being the Jedi academy’s headmaster, recruitment officer, and most experienced teacher means that Luke Skywalker can set his own schedule. Mostly he uses the privilege for things like visiting the Force-sensitive children who aren’t on campus, or investigating rumors of new possible students, or occasionally going to visit Leia and Han. Today, he’s declared a long weekend so he and Kaytoo can jump to a seemingly random point in space and try to defy some truly terrible odds.

When Kaytoo told Luke the odds, synthetic eyebrows raised in emphasis, the Jedi only smirked. 

Kaytoo and Luke watch a Kuati-made armored transport appear in real space roughly ten kilometers away, the asteroids between them concealing their presence. During the Rebellion era, an Imperial transport like that would have had a crew of ten, up to twenty troopers to fend off boarders, and enough armor to survive a wide range of attacks. Kaytoo already sees retrofits on this one, though; bigger guns, faster engines. He wonders if the guards have been similarly upgraded.

Another oddity is the route the ship is taking; a series of jumps through the back edges of the galaxy, taking a route so inefficient as to be suspicious. The First Order’s shadow has fallen over more and more star systems, to the point that they have entire sectors in which to move freely; the secrecy is only necessary to protect the incredibly rare cargo. 

Ironically, the nature of the cargo is the only reason Luke knows about the shipment in the first place. According to him, the Force has led them to intercept the transport.

Will of the Force or not, Kay reflects, knowing the family of the kidnapped child certainly helps.

To rescue her, they’re banking on three things: one, the transport is unescorted. Two, no one on board knows Luke and Kaytoo are coming. Three, one of the jump points is at the edge of an asteroid field. At this particular spot, the field isn’t so dense as to make flying through it suicidal (the odds of death are merely in the seventy-fourth percentile), but it is dense enough to confuse the freighter’s sensors. 

Luke hides in the wake of one enormous rock after another, slipping between them like a shadow. It isn’t the first time Kaytoo’s seen his piloting, but all the other instances have been fairly standard flights, nothing like the perilous grace of navigating the asteroids. When the droid takes a moment from cataloging all of their near-death experiences to glance at Luke, the Jedi has a look on his face that Kay’s rarely seen, a perfect flow state made bright with joy. 

They alight on the belly of the freighter, magnetically clamping to the hull. Kaytoo activates a dynamic magnetic shield around their ship, its sphere changing into a dome where it meets the hull of the freighter. Then he opens their shuttle’s cargo bay doors to reveal well-worn durasteel.

“The seal is holding. Preparing standby mode.” 

They climb from the cockpit to the cargo bay, Luke fitting a precautionary personal force field generator and rebreather apparatus over his robes. They both take encrypted comm links and a small jet pack. 

“Ready?” Luke asks, and unclips his lightsaber from his belt.

“Ready,” Kaytoo confirms.

Luke stands on the exposed hull of the freighter, ignites the lightsaber, and cuts down into the other ship’s plating. 

“Nice to see that thing finally have some practical use,” Kaytoo remarks. 

“I could say the same for your strategic programming,” Luke says. He makes a hole large enough for them both to jump through with little difficulty, the bubble of their shield keeping the air in both ships. The Jedi pushes the metal cylinder inside the freighter with the Force, then jumps through, followed by Kaytoo.

The reversal of artificial gravity is disorienting, but Luke catches Kaytoo and sets him on his feet. They’re in a huge space lined with shipping containers of weapons, food, building materials.

All the facilities for life support are several levels above. They make their way to the turbolift, wait for the doors to slide open, and kill the two Stormtroopers that emerge. Luke’s face is grim now, but Kaytoo has to admit that he’s glad to finally have weapons of his own.

They emerge on the correct level, taking down three more guards. Luke, perhaps sensing the child, Arlunia, guides them past the most probable door and down further. The barracks are between them and whatever passes for a nursery, so they move to clear them out first.

Strangely, the living quarters are guarded, too. Well. Not for long.

“Do I need to be worried by how much you’re enjoying shooting people?” Luke asks wryly.

“I think you should worry about the mission first,” Kay responds. He has to slice the door panel open. 

“Why are they guarding the barracks, anyway?” Luke muses. Kaytoo has his suspicions, but he doesn’t voice them. He’s right or he’s not, and they’ll find out as soon as the door opens.

The door opens. Luke is inside first, lightsaber ready to deflect blaster shots or take out more guards. Someone shoots, and he bats a plasma bolt harmlessly to the side, but then he makes a distressed noise. Kaytoo wedges himself into the room, trying to see where his friend’s been hit. Before he does, Luke shoves his open palm towards the ceiling and a dozen blasters fly upwards. He closes his fist and sweeps it to the side; the blasters follow, clattering down the far wall in a rain of carboplast.

The people shooting at them are using the bunks for cover, well-hidden, but Kay can see the occasional sliver of white plastoid. He holds his blaster at the ready, but Luke touches his hand right above the stock.

“Change it to stun,” Luke says, and turns off his lightsaber. “Please, Kay.” 

Alarmed, Kaytoo grudgingly complies. “What are you doing?” he hisses.

Luke shakes his head. “It’s worse than I thought.”

Kaytoo is about to ask what that has to do with lowering his weapon in the middle of a standoff when a cry, higher-pitched than he would have expected, rises from six - no, eight -  throats hidden among the bunks.

“The First Order forever!”

Vibroblades and fists raised to attack, Stormtroopers burst forth. But Kaytoo is taken aback; though they wear the same armor, they’re approximately sixty percent smaller than the guards. Sadness deepening on his face, Luke holds them back with the Force and disarms them without a touch.

Typical human children of that size, Kaytoo recalls, range in age from nine to twelve years in age. He stuns two before looking back toward Luke.

“We’d been wondering how they inspired extreme loyalty in their troops,” Kaytoo says. “Early indoctrination is a costly but very reliable way to do that.”

Luke curses.

“Indeed,” Kaytoo agrees, and stuns another cadet. “I can carry two at a time, but getting all of them to the ship will take too long.”

“I know.” Luke collects all the children’s weaponry and floats it out of the room. A few of the more creative troopers try to improvise weapons from the materials in the room, and another tries to slip through the door. “We’d have to keep them sedated all the way back, too. And they’d likely just run back to First Order space at the first opportunity.” 

Kaytoo nods. He does notice, however, that a number of the child soldiers aren’t fighting as fiercely as the others. “I think some of them might go willingly. They might even help with the infant.”

Luke’s eyes dart over the combatants, and then he pushes the first row of cadets hard against the side wall. Some of them hit their heads and slide to the floor. The others fall in a disoriented heap.

“We’re here to rescue you,” Luke says to the remaining cadets. It’s true now, Kay supposes. “Come with us.”

“Who are you?” one of the children asks, voice trembling but strong. 

Luke takes a breath, but Kaytoo gets there first. “Beings who want you to be free. I was an Imperial droid a long time ago, before I was reprogrammed,” he says. “Having choices was confusing and unpleasant, at first, but it turns out free will is superior to certainty.”

The cadets are staring at Kaytoo. One of the loyalists gathers their strength to attack again, but the child that spoke to Luke trips them before they can get purchase. Kaytoo stuns the attacker.

The other child removes their helmet. Close-cropped dark hair is sweat-plastered to their forehead, and sticks up at little in back, their brown cheeks still full with how young they are.

“I’m Kay-tooesso,” Kaytoo says. “What should we call you?”

The child grins, dark eyes sparkling. “Kay-em Five Three Six Two.”

Luke smiles. “I’d call that a good sign. Anyone else want to come?”

A few of the other soldiers look at each other. After a moment, another one removes their helmet, then another, then the remaining six at once. Luke steps aside so that they can leave the room, Kaytoo watching his back in case someone’s just trying to get to the weapons. Luke seals the door just in time for one of the loyalists to regain consciousness and start yelling death threats. There are eleven in the rescue party, now.

“Hurry,” Luke says, and then they’re all running. There are four guards on the door to the nursery, cut down quickly, and Kay inputs the codes he stole from the other door.

He freezes when the doors open. He sees nineteen infants, maybe six months old, sleeping in precisely regimented rows of identical crib modules, different only in their labels: VO-0274, VO-0275, VO-0276, all the way up to VO-0292. A twentieth child is in a crib with only an unfamiliar insignia for a label. 

To one side are hover lifts that fit six cribs each, but only two of them. Even after they fill them, that leaves eight babies. It is fortuitous they’ve recruited the young defectors. 

He and Luke share a look. Then they turn to address the cadets.

“Kay-em, and you,” Luke says to the largest cadet, a paler child with a serious mouth. “Load the hover-lifts. You have to push them back to our ship. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir,” they say in perfect unison.

“Good,” Luke says, a little off-balance. “Everyone else, you’ll need to carry a baby.”

Kaytoo shows the cadets how to properly hold a baby and starts handing out infants. Luke stands by a particular crib, organic hand gently stroking the hair of the child within. “I don’t want a lightsaber near a baby,” he says to Kay. “Take her, please.”

Kaytoo looks at Arlunia, the way she’s staring quietly at Luke. He’s seen that strange, quiet attention a juvenile Force-user gives a Jedi before.

The child accepts Kay lifting her from the crib, one tiny fist tightening in his tunic, and he’s glad for the padding under his synthskin as the warm weight of the infant settles against him.

They run.

The cargo lifts they squeeze the children into are slow. So slow that the First Order troops will be waiting for them at the bottom if no one stops them. Kaytoo slices the lifts so that they won’t open except from the inside and disables all but one of the remaining turbolifts. He and Luke take it, speeding down as fast as the hardware will allow.

There’s another squad of Stormtroopers waiting for them in the main cargo bay. Luke deflects their blaster bolts back at them, felling two this way. Kaytoo shoots the other two, holding the blaster as far from the child as possible, playing soothing sounds from his vocoder to quiet her as she squirms.

They make it to the cargo lift doors just as a clatter of footsteps from the ventilation shaft announces the arrival of the loyalist cadets.

Kaytoo shoots the leader. The stun bolt hits his target, and for once he’s glad he isn’t using deadly force. It’s irrational, since those children have an eighty-eight point two percent chance of growing into model adult Stormtroopers; but he’s still glad. Cassian always went to great lengths to avoid killing child soldiers.

Pushing a wave of grief back down, he shoots again.

The last turbolift opens again, and more adult Stormtroopers charge out. Kaytoo calculates that unless Luke does something drastic, their chances of mission success have dropped by twenty-three percent. Their chances of survival have dropped by twelve.

The adult troopers raise their sights to shoot Luke and then scream as a huge, cephalopod-like droid drops on top of them from the ceiling. With six arms and blasters mounted in apparently all of them, the droid makes quick work of the troopers. 

Luke stands in a guard position in front of the children, lightsaber slowly falling as he gapes at the scene. Kaytoo just hopes the newcomer won’t interfere with their mission and starts calculating reasons why they would be attacking the Stormtroopers. If they’re a pirate, there’s an eighty-six point nine chance that the cargo will entice them more than the defectors.

Kaytoo turns his attention back to the attacking child troopers, and is alarmed to see that yet another adult trooper is striding towards them, the children preparing to get into formation. 

Kaytoo hasn’t even switched his blaster back to plasma when the adult trooper stuns all the cadets in rapid succession. Blaster rifle held at alert, the trooper proceeds towards the group. After a few steps the plastoid armor shimmers, and suddenly the holoprojection is gone, revealing an infiltration droid. 

The cargo hold has gone quiet.

The six-armed droid crawls over the guard’s bodies towards Luke, stopping just outside of their own arm’s reach. They give the group an evaluating look.

“A rescue?” they ask. “Did you know there would be offspring aboard?”

Luke gives the droid a thoughtful look. “We knew about one of them. The rest were a surprise.”

The droid starts to pace back and forth across the deck, their six legs sidestepping each other and occasionally a rogue cargo container that winds up in their path. “The cadets are listed as crew, the infants as a ‘Personnel, Stage One’ - but only nineteen of them,” they say. With one multi-jointed arm, they point straight at Arlunia. Reflexively, Kaytoo turns to shield her. “They listed that one only as ‘the weapon’ and flagged them to be brought directly to the Supreme Leader. We thought it actually referred to a weapon of some kind, not a juvenile Jedi. Very tiresome.”

Kaytoo narrows his eyes. “So you’re not going to try to take her?”

The droid rocks back a little. “Do we look like babysitters? We capture bounties and steal specialized weapons. We have neither the resources nor the time to care for young.”

“Speaking of time,” Luke interjects, “if any of them sent a distress signal, backup will arrive any minute. We need to go. Now.”

“There’s no one left to send a signal,” the infiltration droid says, voice without any synthetic tones to it at all. “We killed them before we came down here. They won’t know anything’s wrong until the ship doesn’t arrive on schedule in six hours.”

Luke is still staring at them in what Kaytoo recognizes as suspicion. It must be disconcerting, he realizes, not to be able to rely on the Force to help him make judgements about someone’s intentions. He’s gotten better at reading Kaytoo, but not enough to pick up strange droids’ motivations in a stressful situation.

“Well, thank you for your help, then, even if you didn’t intend to,” Luke finally says, sincerely. “I’m sure there are still things here you could sell to make the trip worth your while.”

The hexapod pauses in their pacing and gives Luke a closer look. “Do I know you?”

“I’ve never met any droid like you,” Luke said, shifting his weight slowly to have a better stance if he needs to fight. “I’d remember that.” 

The many-eyed head tilts to one side. “No, I’m ninety point eight percent sure I know you.”

“I just have one of those faces,” Luke shrugs, and his hand moves closer to his lightsaber.

“He’s Luke Skywalker,” the infiltration droid says with mild exasperation. “Older than in the holos, but that’s definitely him, Tooesso.”

Kaytoo’s optics snap onto Tooesso. “Oh, no.” 

Luke is looking thoughtful. “If that’s short for Kay-tooesso, maybe we have met.”

The droid stands up higher on all six legs, body now almost as high as a KX’s head would be. “Yes. Decades ago. It’s just Tooesso, now.”

“I love what you’ve done with your chassis,” Luke says, amusement crinkling his eyes. “Definitely better than that old protocol droid.” 

“Thanks,” Tooesso replies, dry as an asteroid in a trinary system. “You’re less painfully cheerful.”

Luke snorts. “Oh, we've definitely met.”

“Wait,” Kay-em says, glancing between Kaytoo and Tooesso. “How can both of you be Kay-tooesso? Your models aren’t anything at all alike.”

Tooesso stares, then undulates forward on his six legs, circling the group until he's close enough to loom over Kaytoo, quadruple lenses trained on his humanoid counterpart.

Kaytoo meets his optics without flinching. 

“A nanny chassis? Really?”

Kaytoo raises an eyebrow. “It has its advantages.”

Tooesso snorts. “If you want to call them that.”

“Look, Kay, can you get his holonet address or something?” Luke gestures for the cadets to move towards their point of entry, but he’s still standing between them and the droids. “I know we have a little time but the sooner we can feed the kids the better.”

Kaytoo turns back to Luke. “Get them aboard. If this ship really is empty, I want to copy their computer systems. Tooesso and I can talk on our way there and back.”

Luke’s mouth thins to a flat line, but he nods and takes the baby from Kay. Kaytoo feels oddly nervous to give her up.

“If he dismantles you, you’re reassembling yourself,” Luke warns. 

Kaytoo smiles as he gets back into the turbolift. He’s familiar with Luke’s empty threats. Tooesso climbs the ventilation shaft, so fast that he’s already waiting on the bridge level when the lift doors open.

Kaytoo makes his way to a control console, fishes his network cable out of his sleeve, and starts slicing. All sorts of interesting data begins to flow through his circuits, but he still has enough attention left over to talk to his counterpart.

“You met Luke on Hoth, correct?”

Tooesso plugs in his own network cable to the next console over. “Correct.”

“Have you been active since then?” It’s an unsettling thought, that this copy had twenty-two more years of experience than he did. “I was in a cache on Takodana until five years ago.”

The spider-like head regards Kaytoo. “I was in sleep mode for a little over nine years since activation,” he says. “When was your creation date?”

Ah, yes. A dry, factual question whose answer was more emotional than any version of K-2SO was comfortable with.

“Seven hundred forty-eight days BBY,” he says, “but I have memory files of everything up to three days BBY.”

One pair of optics narrows their aperture, while the other pair seems to blink. “You met another copy?”

“Yes. The most recent one.” He sighs, brings a hand to his face. “Finishing this datamine will only take a few more minutes. Making a copy of whatever you’re missing probably won’t take much longer.”

The hexapod makes a dismissive noise. “No, thanks.”

Kaytoo blinks. “What’s your creation date? I have plenty of memory chips.”

The hexapod imitates a sigh, then crawls up a wall and hangs from a ventilation grille. “I date from two hundred thirty days BBY.”

A week after the shipping crate. Kaytoo’s cooling system stutters and his circuits flood with sympathy and anguish. “Then the memories will mean even more to you. Things got better from then. Much better.”

“I said no.” Tooesso contracts upwards. “Four years ago I made a compressed index and deleted all full memory files. It was the right choice. The last thing I need is more memories.”

After a moment of disbelief, horror washes over Kaytoo. “You...you deleted Cassian.”

“Yes,” Tooesso says, calm as deep space. “Now do you understand?”

“No!” Kay says, and he considers unplugging himself and walking away, First Order secrets be damned. 

Of course he doesn’t understand. He can hardly believe it’s possible. On several occasions he’s thought about deleting himself, sure; but never his memories of Cassian. Even living with only the rejection and not the relationship or the message, Kaytoo can’t imagine erasing the remnants of the man he loves. 

“Anyway,” Tooesso says into the silence, “Of course I was planning on selling what I found here, but credits aren’t my primary motivation. I’ve been catching glimpses of the First Order’s activity for a few years now. They strike me as a growing threat. Do we agree on that, at least?”

Kaytoo shakes himself. “Yes. It’s alarming that they have the influences and resources necessary to kidnap that many infants without anyone interfering.”

“Especially a larval Jedi,” Tooesso muses. “What do you suppose they wanted with that?”

“Nothing good,” Kaytoo says, refraining from pointing out that humans don’t have larval stages.

“No.”

They both ruminate over that as they wait for their data transfers to end. An asteroid drifts slowly by the viewport.

“Here,” Kaytoo says after a moment, giving Tooesso his anonymous holonet dropbox address. “If you learn of more kidnappings - Jedi-related or not - would you let me know?”

Tooesso shrugs, a strange sight on an upside-down hexapod. “Chances are high. In return, I’d appreciate knowing anything else about them that might be solved with a little light piracy or bounty-hunting.”

“Agreed,” Kaytoo says. The files finish copying. He retracts his cable and eyes Tooesso.

“Do you want to talk to a third copy?” he finally asks. “I met him last year. Historian. Wrote a whole book about the Rebellion.”

Tooesso climbs down to the floor again. “A historian? Why am I the only one who made a sensible career choice?”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

“I can look him up later if I change my mind,” Tooesso says, and starts crawling for the ventilation shaft. “Lovely meeting you,” he says, tone dry but not entirely insincere. “Good luck with your brood of humans.”

Kaytoo rolls his eyes as he opens the turbolift. “May the Force be with you. I suppose.”

Watching the lift doors close on the sight of the hexapod frozen in shock is moderately gratifying, at least. A little something to make up for how unbalanced he feels, knowing any version of himself could choose to forget Cassian.

By the time he arrives back at the entrance Luke had cut in the cargo hold, the Jedi has loaded all the children into their small ship. Cadets sit in jump seats and on the deck, infants cradled in plastoid-armored arms, filling almost all the available space. Also, most of the babies are awake and eight of them are crying.

“Once we're in hyperspace, I'll see what I can do to keep the peace,” Luke says as he seals the bay doors and releases the magnetic docking clamps. “Set a course for Coyerti.”

Kaytoo double-checks the hyperjump coordinates, then runs a brief search through the new data. “Are you planning to relocate Arlunia’s family once they’re reunited? Because if they stay where they are, the First Order will only find them again, with a seventy-eight percent chance of killing everyone but Arlunia.” 

“We’re relocating them,” Luke says, pulling the hyperthrottle and blurring the stars. “Leia’s been investigating potential hiding places.”

Kaytoo relaxes, glad to be safe in hyperspace. “Good. And the others?”

Luke stands up and stretches. “Reunions and relocations for the ones whose families we can find, adoption for those we can’t.”

“Child soldiers will have a difficult time integrating into civilian life. They will require special support.”

Luke gives Kay an evaluating look. “I guess you’d know.”

Kaytoo ignores the lance of grief through his chest. “Do you know of any resources for that?”

Luke smiles wryly as he stands up. “Just you. Leia probably knows more.” He gestures towards the cargo bay. “Duty calls.”

“I will assist in case of life-threatening emergencies,” Kaytoo says, and Luke chuckles as he moves into the hold.

Kaytoo is left with the stars streaming by, listening with partial attention to the debacle of nine cadet Stormtroopers and one middle-aged Jedi trying to improvise diapers and baby food. Sixteen minutes of that renders the cargo hold relatively quiet, and then Kaytoo hears footsteps approaching.

They’re too light for Luke, so he turns in his seat to see who it is.

Kay-em Five Three Six Two is there, a sleeping baby in their arms, hanging back a little when they see Kaytoo looking.

“Um,” the cadet says, softly but clearly, “no one ever answered my question. Sir.”

Kaytoo thinks back. “How I could have the same designation as the hexapod?”

A nod.

He sees no reason not to tell them. As he explains, the cadet grows thoughtful.

“I still don’t understand, sir. How could you wind up so different when you both had the same starting point?”

Kaytoo doesn’t know how much the training protocols for Stormtroopers have changed between the Empire and the First Order (or after thirty-odd years), but he knows how it used to be. A Stormtrooper was presented with only a very few possibilities, and even less choice: obedience or punishment. Dedication to the cause of order or responsibility for the rise of chaos. Glorified death in combat or utter worthlessness.

Droids weren’t given even that much choice, but Kaytoo’s analytic programming has always enabled him to see all possible outcomes, even if he couldn’t choose between them under the Empire.

“Every choice eliminates certain possibilities,” Kaytoo says, hoping Kay-em will  understand. “Your choice leave the First Order means you will never be able to work towards a promotion in their ranks, for example.” 

Kay-em nods gravely.

“However, each choice also creates new possibilities.”

Kay-em thinks. “I’m talking to you, which I can only do because I left.”

“Precisely. Your path has changed based on your choice. Some are more significant than others, to be sure; leaving the First Order will change your life much more than what color tunic you put on tomorrow.”

Kay-em considers this.

“What was your most significant choice?” 

“Deciding not to self-terminate,” Kaytoo says easily, and then freezes. The idea tends to upset organics.

Kay-em just nods as if it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say, which is a rather disturbing relief. “Okay, but the other Kay-tooesso is alive too. I meant, what was the big decision that made you different?”

Perceptive humans are going to be the death of him. “He made many decisions I have no knowledge of.”

Kay-em won’t stop looking at him. “Are there any you do know about?”

Kaytoo sighs. “He chose to delete his memories of the person most important to us. I still have mine.”

Kay-em absorbs this. “How would memories make a difference?”

“They’re the context for everything you think and do. Your choices are the important thing, but they don’t happen in isolation.” He pauses. “Why did you choose to leave today? I don’t imagine you did it spontaneously. You must have thought about leaving before.”

Kay-em curls in on themself, arms wrapped protectively around the baby. “Yeah.”

“You were probably thinking about those times, or things that made you want to leave, when you decided to leave today, yes?”

Kay-em nods. “So your memories are important. And for a droid…” A host of memory files queue up in Kaytoo’s processor, but he pulls his thoughts back before he can get lost in the past. “More so.” 

“Oh.” Thoughtful, Kay-em rubs circles on the baby’s back.

Kaytoo waits for the cadet to talk more, if they feel like it. They don’t appear to.

“Did that answer your question?”

Kay-em brings themself back to the present and does a poor job of projecting certainty. “Yes, thank you, sir.” 

Kaytoo raises a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re only slightly better at lying than I am.”

A nervous giggle. “Okay. It kind of answered the question, but...I still don’t understand. All that difference, just from choices?”

Kaytoo shrugs. “You lack background knowledge. I predict you will come to understand as you learn more.”

Kay-em brightens. “Okay. Thank you, sir.”

Luke appears in the doorway. “Kay-em, you hungry? We’re passing around some ration bars in the hold.” 

The child gives Kaytoo a conflicted look.

“Calling me ‘sir’ hasn’t made me feel the need to dismiss you,” Kaytoo says. 

Looking a little lost, Kay-em stands up. “So I just...leave?”

“It is customary to say goodbye.”

“Then, goodbye, Kay-tooesso, sir,” they say, and go. Luke’s eyes are crinkling as he watches them climb down to the cargo hold.

“You’re getting pretty good at this whole teaching thing,” the Jedi says, leaning against the back of the pilot’s chair and unwrapping a ration bar. “Maybe you should be in charge of the school.”

“Very funny,” Kaytoo says.

“Not as funny as Kay-em calling you ‘sir,’” Luke grins.

Kaytoo rolls his optics. “You’re forcing me to re-evaluate my reasons to continue working with you.”

“You love my sass and you know it.”

“Do I?”

“And you’d start missing the students in a month, tops.”

They’ve been on this particular mission for just over a week, and Kaytoo already misses Miwa and Zylas. “I doubt it. Organics are all so troublesome.”

“Uh-huh,” Luke says, smirking as he eats. “You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”

He isn’t. He doesn’t mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: child soldiers, canon-typical violence.


	13. Hosnian Prime, 28 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my amazing wife [A Kiss of Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire) for the beta, but especially for loving the historians and helping me give them life. *blows a kiss* 
> 
> This chapter has spoilers for Claudia Gray's _Bloodline_ , which is a great Leia book I recommend to everyone. If you don't want to be spoiled, you can read the first section and then skip to the last section, which starts with "Leia meets them over lunch." The sections in-between cover the how and why of Leia leaving the Senate to start the Resistance.
> 
> Content warnings in end notes.

Leia doesn’t follow academics much; keeping track of the hundreds of Senators, Governors and other political leaders takes up more than its fair share of her life. But, since reading their first book, she makes an exception for Doctor Soraya Kidell and K-2SO, the only droid historian she knows of who manages to take credit for his own work. (Of course, during the Rebellion he was the only droid she ever saw get away with interrupting a General, so making himself heard seems to be a talent of his.) They don’t talk much; they’re all busy people. But Leia takes a little time every quarter or so to check on their work.

This time, she doesn’t even have to sift through dry academic journals to find the good stuff. It’s the first day of the year’s legislative session, and the historians have published an investigative editorial in the _Hosnia Journal._ It’s a well-reasoned, informative, disturbing piece that ends with a condemnation of all the Senatorial deadlock of the past decade:

 

> Of course the parallels aren’t perfect; the galaxy is a messy place, and the repetitions of history tend to be echoes rather than recordings. But this much is clear: the current political situation is fertile ground for the rise of an authoritarian regime. Furthermore, all evidence indicates that such a regime has already begun to grow in the shadows.
> 
> It would be bad enough if this threat were on par with the Galactic Empire, but it in this case, history’s echoes are threatening to be louder, harsher, and more destructive than the original. The sheer quantity of unaccounted-for resources is unprecedented in known history; if this group were developing their military in a fashion similar to our own, they’ve already amassed what they need to make an attack on the Republic. That they have not suggests that there is something far worse than star destroyers lurking in our future.
> 
> But this can be stopped. If we investigate the destination of the raw materials, find the missing children, and once again begin truly governing from the Senate, we have a chance to prevent another epoch of conquest and oppression.
> 
> Conversely, continuing on as we have will allow the threat to grow unchecked. If we see a third planet-killer in our lifetime, it will be not just because violent idealogues built it, but also because the rest of us failed to stop them.

Leia’s been aware of the political climate — the polarization, the unwillingness to compromise, the near-total lack of substantive actions taken, the majority of the population hostile to any ideas that forced them to change their behavior — and what it could engender. Of course it worries her; she knows her history better than most.

But the interpretation of enormous datasets is something she doesn’t have the capacity for, so it’s a rude awakening to hear that the best analytical historians of their generation are sure enough of a growing fascist movement to risk their reputations on it. And if that’s the case...

The Republic has even less time than she thought.

* * *

Since they’d moved to Hosnian Prime seven years ago, Kaytoo and Soraya have made a point to follow the Senate. However, given the near-complete lack of any real progress, the historians do their following by using the legislative sessions’ holofeed as background noise for whatever else they happen to be doing.

However, today is different. A Populist staffer let slip to Soraya that the Senate was going to create a higher office, so that decisions might actually be made, so the historians have taken a break from examining first-hand accounts of ‘strange phenomena’ that could possibly be explained by Force-use.

Well, Soraya has. Kaytoo can do multiple things at a time, so he is both sitting next to Soraya in the public-access section of the Senate chamber and cross-referencing the mysterious occurrences with an Imperial incident report database. It keeps him from becoming painfully bored.

The Senate as a whole votes in favor of the new position, which is encouraging. Then the nomination speeches begin.

Kaytoo sighs inwardly. The organic tendency to be persuaded by impassioned, biased pontificating is detrimental to the galaxy’s overall well-being, of course, but it’s also just damn irritating.

Finally, the Loneran Senator concludes singing Leia’s (not entirely undeserved) praises. “And so it is with the greatest confidence and pride that I nominate Senator Leia Organa, hero of the Rebellion, to stand as First Senator of the New Republic!”

Applause from the Populists, of course. Coldly polite indifference from the Centrists. Those who don’t look worried, that is.

“Does any person present know of any fact that would disqualify Senator Organa from higher office?”

Nobody expects that to be answered in the affirmative. Leia is practically untouchable.

“I must take the floor,” says Ransolm Casterfo, the Senator from Riosa, and everyone (except Lady Carise, isn’t _that_ interesting) looks at him in surprise. Soraya puts a hand on Kaytoo’s arm.

The Senator is carrying something. It’s a wooden box carved in Alderaanian style.

“I have a bad feeling about that,” Kaytoo says.

Soraya frowns and nods. “Casterfo’s never used a prop before.”

Casterfo explains, plays the obviously private holomessage from Bail Organa, and Kaytoo is yet again a contemptuous witness to a major turning point in history.

If anything infuriates him about organics, it’s their arbitrary attachment of morality to biology. Anyone with even the most rudimentary capacity for reasoning can see that Leia Organa is a vastly different person from Darth Vader, and the fact that he contributed to her zygote is material only to discussions of medical history.

In the Senate chamber, all eyes are on Leia, expecting her to deny it. Kaytoo watches her expression shift from shock and betrayal to determined acceptance, and he knows she won’t.

“Senator Casterfo’s accusation is true. My father is Darth Vader.”

Kaytoo waits for the yelling to die down before trying to speak with Soraya.

“Let’s go. Nothing else is happening today.”

In shock herself, Soraya nods mutely.

Kaytoo keeps her from being pushed around in the furor. As they leave the Capitol building and board the levitrain back to the University, Kaytoo thinks.

Taking typical organic behavior into account, there’s a ninety-four percent chance that Leia’s political career is over. And, given how instrumental she was to the Populist cause, it’s an eighty-seven percent chance that the First Senator will be a Centrist.

Even on the eleven percent chance that the major Centrist powers aren’t involved with the growing fascism beyond Republic borders, a Centrist government will be much easier to conquer than a Populist one. Kaytoo runs the numbers, and by the time Soraya is stepping onto the University platform, alternating between outbursts and silence, he has a figure.

“How can she just...let them do this to her?” Soraya asks, hands cutting through the air as they walk to their office. “She’s never sat still to be run over before!”

Kaytoo considers. “No,” he says slowly. Looks down at Soraya. “It’s possible her own feelings about her parentage have given her self-destructive urges, but I think it’s more likely that she’s deemed the situation with the Senate as no longer tenable.”

Soraya’s eyes drift to the side in thought. “You think she’s making a strategic decision.”

“Yes.”

“And knowing her,” Soraya says, the anguish finally lifting a little from her shoulders, “she isn’t going to just fade into the background.”

“Indeed.”

Soraya opens their door. When they’re inside, she locks it and turns on the white noise generator Kaytoo insisted on installing when they moved in.

“What are the odds that she’s going to start another Alliance?”

That’s an easy calculation. “Ninety-six percent, and they’re only that low to account for the possibility of illness or assassination.”

Soraya nods, slight smile on her face, though she still looks distressed. Kaytoo sympathizes; he’s been wishing he could bash the New Republic into fixing itself almost since he woke up.

“How much does this push up the timetable for the end of the Republic?” she asks quietly, not meeting Kaytoo’s optics.

Before today’s revelations, Kaytoo had estimated a sixty-eight percent likelihood that they would witness the fall of the New Republic in their lifetimes. It had worried Soraya enough that she’s ignored Kaytoo’s predictions of failure and published their alarming findings in hopes that the Senate would do something.

He’d been right about the response to the editorial. He was probably right now, too, though he wished he wasn’t.

“Authoritarian takeover of the New Republic,” Kaytoo says, glad that Cassian couldn’t know the short duration of the freedom he’d died for, “will be statistically inevitable in four to ten years.”

Soraya bursts into tears.

* * *

Senator Organa manages to secure another hearing, this one about the Napkin Bombing. Soraya and Kaytoo are back in the Senate to support Leia, not that the Senator knows they’re there.

Organa’s investigations look solid. Soraya watches the floor but keeps one ear on the sound of Kaytoo’s drives, knowing he’s feeding the new data into his schema, evaluating its possible truth and extrapolating possible outcomes.

Leia is accused of lying, of course. It looks like the whole thing is going to be a dead issue. Soraya expects nothing else when Ransolm Casterfo stands up again.

“My fellow Senators. You will remember that I accompanied Senator Organa on her first mission to investigate Rinnrivin Di. I continued working with her for some time after this, exploring the ties between his cartel and the paramilitary group known as the Amaxine warriors. Given what I know, I am bound by honor to say that — despite what I have stated in this chamber about her honesty — on this subject she is telling the truth.”

Silence. Then angry murmuring. Then angry shouting. Soraya wonders if this has changed Kaytoo’s dour outlook on the Republic’s life expectancy, but she doubts it. There still isn’t a First Senator, so she’ll be surprised if the politicians actually take action.

As the day’s session devolves into squabbling about who’s going to lead the investigation and who, precisely, should be investigated, Soraya sighs.

“Twenty credits says they never come up with anyone to convict,” she says sarcastically to Kaytoo. They both know it’s never going to happen.

Killjoy looks at her, then back out at the Senate. “Bet accepted,” he says easily, and Soraya startles. Then she starts trying to follow his gaze, tries to figure out what he sees that she missed.

She still hasn’t found it by the end of the day’s session.

* * *

From then on, they go back to watching the Senate sessions on holo. If nothing else, Soraya wants to be able to cry about the state of the galaxy in peace.

They’re still working on the ‘mysterious phenomena’ data when something interesting happens in the Capitol building.

Soraya’s jaw falls open at the holorecording presented to the senate. There’s no way Casterfo is the one behind the Napkin Bombing, but there he is in blue, doing the most damning thing possible.

“It’s fabricated,” Kaytoo says behind her, startling her a little. She hadn’t heard him get up. “Any fool can see that.”

But the Senate is all too happy to take the scapegoat they’ve been given. He’s impeached and convicted before the end of the day.

Soraya turns off the holo and hands Kaytoo his twenty credits. “How did you know?”

“Lady Carise wasn’t surprised by Leia’s parentage, implying she already knew. But Casterfo was the one to deliver the killing blow, implying she was using him to keep her hands clean. She apparently didn’t like him supporting Organa’s investigation.” He slouches a little deeper. “The chances that she’s the one behind the bombing, or connected to who is, are high. Very high.”

Soraya wants to scream, to throw things, to march down to the Senate and make them accuse the correct person.

But she knows, on the deepest level, that it won’t work. They’re condemned to watch another Republic crumble, knowing the hows and whys, while no one listens to them.

Soraya looks up at Kaytoo. He’s been her friend for almost ten years, and she knows him better than anyone else. From the very first, it’s been important to him that Cassian’s work, the work of the Rebellion as a whole, hadn’t been done in vain. Important to him that people understand what happened.

So she thinks, with eighty-two percent certainty (she never has been as good at he is at extrapolations), that he’s already come to the same conclusions she has.

“The end will be closer to four years than ten, won’t it,” she says.

“Yes.”

“After they take the government, they’ll come for the intellectuals,” she continues. “Rebellion historians will be first against the wall.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Therefore, even if we stay at the University we won’t have that much time for academia anyway.”

“Agreed.”

“And military operations need analysts. Strategists.”

In what she’s come to interpret as emotional investment, Kaytoo’s optics flare brighter for a second. “Of course.”

“The best thing to do is leave,” she says, and her voice catches, because the University is her home, research her passion, and she doesn’t want to leave, not at all.

But she has to face facts. “We could try to disappear in the Outer Rim,” she continues, and then takes a deep breath, “but I’d rather join Leia Organa with whatever resistance she’s planning.” She stops, eyes wide at the enormity of her proposal. She’s never even gotten a ticket for driving a speeder too fast, let alone joined an extralegal military group. “ What do you think?”

Kaytoo says, “I have already sent her a message with our intentions.”

Soraya stares, then bursts out laughing. “What were you going to do if I wanted to disappear?”

“You are easily subdued and carried,” he says, deadpan. Then an affectionate undertone creeps in. “And sufficiently intelligent to realize I’m right.”

Shaking her head, Soraya lets herself lean into Kaytoo’s chest, face scrunching against his plating as her arms come around his waist. “Love you too, Killjoy. I just wish...”

“Yes,” he agrees, and she’s sure he knows what she meant.

They stay like that for a while, his huge metal hand gently patting her shoulders until she can make herself let go and step away. “Okay,” she says briskly. “I’ll put in for a leave of absence. You start backing up our archives.”

* * *

Leia meets them over lunch in a restaurant on the edge of the University district. There are plenty of student patrons, but they’re the only faculty present, and Leia is definitely the only Senator. A few people stare at her, but she acts as if she doesn’t notice.

The three of the keep the conversation light at first, a little talk about the historians’ work, a little talk about Leia’s family.

“Anyone listening in, Kaytoo?” Soraya asks near the end of the meal.

“No,” the droid says. “No one in the room, no electronic monitoring frequencies, and no one close enough and of the right species to hear us over the ambient noise.”

Soraya smiles with a determined glint in her eyes. “We’d like to volunteer,” she said without preamble.

Leia snorted. “To the point. I knew I liked you.”  She looked between them both, then settled on Kaytoo. “You still have that strategic analysis programming?”

Soraya frowns, but Kaytoo’s steady gaze doesn’t waver. “Why do you think I’m so good at recognizing historical trends?”

“We know how the Rebel Alliance worked,” Soraya says, voice low but impassioned. “We know how the Old Republic fell. We’ve been seeing the fascists coming for years now, and we already know some of the ways they’re different from the Empire. You need us.”

Leia smiles and puts a hand over Soraya’s fist. “You had me at ‘volunteer.’ I just like to know exactly what I’m working with.”

The girl blinks, then blushes. “Oh. Thank you. Sorry.”

“No harm done,” Leia says, and then feels the smile fade. “You need to know what you’re working with, too. This won’t be easy. You’ll be in danger from all sides. Once we establish a base you’ll have to go off-grid, which means limited contact with the galaxy at large. You’ll have to lie to your friends and family,” she says, and the memory of Ben’s betrayed face from their last holocall doesn’t choke her, but it’s a near thing. “We’re strictly volunteer, so you’ll be free to leave if you want to, but while you’re with us you’ll be expected to follow orders.”

Soraya sets her jaw. “We can do that.” Her eyes slide over to Kaytoo. “ _I_ can do that,” she amends.

“I am entirely capable of following sensible orders,” Kaytoo sniffs.

Leia raises an eyebrow. “‘Sensible.’ No wonder Draven lost his hair. Well, if you’re behind the scenes that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Can you handle staying behind a desk?”

Kaytoo looks at Soraya. “As long as she stays out of the field, yes.”

Face softening, Soraya squeezes Kaytoo’s hand. It’s rather a touching friendship, all things considered.

“Great, it’s settled,” Leia says, and puts an encrypted comm link on the table. “You can expect a flight plan sometime in the next two weeks. Welcome to the Resistance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Depressingly close-to-home discussions of impending political doom.


	14. Yavin IV, 28 ABY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to [A Kiss of Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire) for the beta.
> 
> Content warnings in end notes. **As of July 22, 2018, archive warnings have changed.**

Most of the time, Kay spends his night hours on things like maintaining the interior of the temple, organizing teaching materials, reading, keeping their inventory up-to-date and ordering supplies, or (if Luke’s been more irritating than usual) leaving the Jedi’s favorite things just a tiny bit out of place. Which is to say, he spends the time alone, for the very good reason that most of the organics are asleep.

But not tonight; it’s the first clear night in a month, and Kallum’s taken an interest in astronomy. Kay’s the logical choice to supervise the twelve-year-old ex-Stormtrooper, but he probably would have volunteered even if Luke hadn’t asked.

“Kaytoo, I found the Pilot’s Glass!” Kallum says excitedly, fine-tuning their telescope and waving Kay closer. “You can see all the fainter stars, too! Look!”

They move aside, and Kay dutifully peers through the eyepiece. He does, in fact, see the aforementioned constellation, and in relatively good detail.

“Well done, Kallum,” Kay says.

The kid beams, inducing a wave of pride and affection through Kay’s processors. “Thank you, sir!”

Kay sighs inwardly at the honorific. Kallum’s average daily use of the word has decreased by seventy-nine point six percent in the last year, so he elects to ignore this particular instance. Especially since, for the last month, they’ve only used it when experiencing strong emotions.

Kallum’s been doing well in many respects, actually. At first Kay worried that a child with no Force sensitivity couldn’t socially integrate into a Jedi school; but in just under a year Kallum’s made friends with nearly everyone. They’re doing well with the academic lessons besides, and don’t seem to see their lack of sensitivity as a deficiency. It probably helps that they and Kay spend time on Kallum’s interests while the others do Force training.

So tonight, they’re stargazing. Every day for a week Kallum studied the constellation map Kay found (well, ‘developed’ might be a better word; the Massassi and their culture were long gone, and the Alliance hadn’t bothered to name constellations during their residence. Kallum was so excited to study them, though, so Kay took the local star maps, ran a shape-identification algorithm, and named the resulting groups. Since Kallum didn’t ask _whose_ constellations they were, Kay didn’t even have to try to lie) and now they’re matching the map to the real night sky.

It’s peaceful.

One half-hour and twelve more constellations later, the internal alarm Kay set earlier goes off.

“All right, Kallum, time to go inside.”

“Aww, but I’m not ti— ” they start, but are cut off by a yawn. “Nuts. Maybe you have a point.”

“I always have a point,” Kay answers, and helps Kallum pack up the telescope.

From the same spot Luke sometimes meditates, the two of them retrace their steps through the unused parts of the secondary temple and through the forest to the school proper. Kallum is talking about their favorite constellations when Kay sees a red glint through the trees.

“Shh,” he says, putting an arm out to stop Kallum. Just on the edge of hearing — maybe only audible to his sensors — is the hum of a lightsaber.

Kay’s been around long enough to have heard stories about red lightsabers.

When he turns back to Kallum, their eyes have gone wide, so it looks like he’s not the only one.

“Hide here,” he whispers. “I’m going to investigate. Don’t make a sound.”

Biting their lip, Kallum nods and starts climbing a tree. Good.

Kay deactivates the external glow of his optics, and he moves closer, nearly silent and keeping to shadows. Before long there’s a flourish of crimson light and a quiet cry that cuts off alarmingly.

Kay throws himself forward to find a stranger standing over Ciel in the ominous glow cast by his saber. Kay’s tactical algorithms are calculating courses of action as they always do, but he loses metaprocessing when he sees the hole charred through Ciel’s chest. Pure rage raises his arm, folds his hand down, and with the built-in blaster he isn't supposed to have puts a plasma bolt through the stranger's head. The man crumples, lightsaber deactivating when his body hits the ground. Kay grabs it.

Screams from the school. Kay shuts down the internal alarm demanding he do something for Ciel and runs back to someone he _can_ help.

“The school is under attack,” he hisses as Kallum jumps down. “We’re going to the bunker.”

Kallum nods, looking grave. They heft the telescope case and adjust their grip, adopting a fighting stance. “We’re closest to the southern door, right?”

“Yes.” They both run, Kay leading his student in an arc around the place Ciel died.

They’re skimming the back of the main temple when they hear lightsabers clashing off one another. Kay stops Kallum again and cautiously peers around the corner.

Zylas is fighting for his life against another attacker. This one's toying with the boy, landing small cuts on his exposed skin with easy, almost lazy strikes.

Like Ciel’s murderer, this one doesn’t notice Kay. Seventy percent likely it's good old-fashioned organic supremacy, but regardless Kay gets close enough to make another clean headshot.

Zylas whirls to face the shooter, only to stumble back in relief when he sees it’s Kay.

“Nice blaster,” Zylas pants, nodding at the charred synthskin of Kay’s wrist. “Wish I had one.”

Kallum runs forward to hug Zylas fiercely. “A blaster would be good.”

Kay doesn’t detect any other enemies nearby, so he rifles through the attacker’s pockets. Kallum releases Zylas, frowning at the fresh scars on their friend's lekku, face and hands, but says nothing.

“Arlunia’s hiding in the kitchen,” Zylas says urgently, tugging on Kay’s shoulder. “I ran out here to draw that guy away. We have to go back before they find her.”

Kay keeps this lightsaber as well, but gives the corpse’s blaster to Kallum. Even going more than a year without training, they still handle the weapon like a professional.

“Next one’s yours,” Kay promises Zylas, and starts running for the kitchen.

Miraculously, they encounter no more attackers on the way, and find Arlunia shaking in a cabinet. As he draws her out, she clings to Kay with all her strength, and though carrying her decreases his combat efficacy by twenty-nine percent, it would be worse for Zylas or Kallum. When they reach the bunker she lets herself be passed to Zylas.

Kay activates the bunker’s comms and records a distress message, enters two holonet addresses, and queues the message to be encrypted and sent.

“Keep the door is sealed unless you’re letting classmates in,” he says. “Help won’t need you to open the door.”

The older children nod, and he locks them in.

Ciel is dead, but there are high chances of other survivors. He hasn’t come across Miwa yet, alive or otherwise, and his chances of helping her are still above thirty percent.

* * *

_It's a longish jump to Eadu, and they're exhausted, so once the adrenaline of escape wears off they all crash. The Guardians are leaned up against each other on jump seats, Bodhi Rook is wedged into a corner and curled in on himself, Jyn Erso sitting with crossed arms and bowed head at a point as far as possible from all the Jedhans, Cassian and Kaytoo in the cockpit. Judging by the humans’ respiratory cycles and heart rates, they're all asleep._

_All but Cassian. Kaytoo knows he won't take a sedative while on mission but he wishes he could somehow get the spy to rest._

_Instead, after all of the others have been asleep for five minutes, Kaytoo gets up, crosses the short distance between the seats, and wraps his arms around Cassian._

_Cassian leans into the embrace, resting his head against Kaytoo's. “I don't suppose I could convince you to stay behind once we’re done with Eadu.” His murmur hums faintly through Kay’s plating._

_“The likelihood of that is equal to my chances of convincing you not to go,” Kaytoo says dryly._

_Cassian frowns, nods. Curls his fingers into Kay’s and holds tight. Another few moments pass in silence._

_“We never did decide if your backup is you or another being with identical memories.”_

_Kaytoo shifts. “Do you really think the risk of death will change my mind? If anything it only guarantees I'll be there to help you.”_

_“This is too big and too important a mission for us to do it on our own, Kay,”  Cassian says. He turns to look Kaytoo in the optics. “Promise me you'll help the others, too.”_

_“Affirmative. I'll prioritize their safety and success immediately under yours.”_

_With a pained look in his eyes Cassian shakes his head. “No, Kay. Whoever has the best chances of success, you help them. Whatever you have to do to get the job done, you do it. No matter what happens to me. You have to.”_

_Kaytoo doesn’t respond right away, but his processors are far from quiet, spinning out scenario after scenario. The only constant is the blinding pain of losing Cassian and the impossible weight of continuing on without him._

_“Kay. If we don’t stop this—”_

_“I know,” Kaytoo says, sharp. Then, softer. “I know. If the planet killer survives, the Rebellion won’t.”_

_And it would only be a matter of time before Cassian followed._

_“Alright,” Kaytoo says at last, though even the idea of it burns his circuits. “I’ll prioritize mission success.” Not because he cares about the Rebellion as a whole. Not even because Cassian asked him to. But because it’s the best way to save the one he loves._

_“Thank you.” Cassian slumps, fight won but weary for it. He’s kept hold of Kay's hand this whole time, and now he reaches up with his other one to trail his fingers over Kaytoo's face plate. “You know...my life's been hard, Kay, but you're the best thing in it.”_

_“I’m better than ration bars and being in near-constant danger? How flattering.”_

_Cassian huffs a laugh. “You know what I mean.”_

_Kay sobers. “Yes,” he says. He brushes the knuckles of one hand down Cassian’s cheek. “I know.”_

* * *

During the war, the first sub-level of the Temple was reinforced so that the level above could support the weight of starfighters. At the same time the rebels also installed a self-destruct system of explosives clustered around the main support beams. Kay can only speculate why it wasn’t activated when the Alliance evacuated following the Battle of Yavin — forty-eight percent chance the system had failed, thirty-one percent the rebels had had enough time to make sure they'd left nothing behind, and twenty-one cumulative percent chance of assorted minor possibilities like a miscommunication or a disagreement or even a rebel who cared more about archaeology than security.  

Whatever the reason, Kay restored the system once he’d decided to stay at the school, because you never knew when you’d need to cover your tracks. Luke objected at first, but Kay pointed out that children often hid things that were important to them, and therefore they could never be sure of leaving behind a clean site if they had to evacuate. Once Luke relented, Kay's kept the system in good repair, checking it weekly.

As he arms the system and grabs the remote detonator, he wishes that his pessimistic predictions weren’t right _quite_ so often.

He runs through the halls of the temple: the student's sleeping quarters (five dead: three in their beds and two near their storage chests, one with a hand curled around the hilt of their lightsaber), the classrooms (no bodies, but streaks of blood that lead to the courtyard outside, ending under the corpses of two more students), the refreshers (the memory of which Kay immediately deletes), and the library (empty). The evidence suggests a party of six to ten assailants, most likely nine before Kay killed two of them.

He doubles back to the playrooms, kitchen and nursery, but they have the same bodies they did when he took Zylas, Kallum and Arlunia through to the bunker.

Miwa’s chances are now split: forty point eight percent she’s been captured, twenty-five point two she's dead somewhere outside the school, and thirty-four she’s escaped. Kay leaves the building, already making for her favorite hiding place, before he hesitates.

If the remaining seven attackers survive, they have an eighty-nine percent chance of going on to kill other Force-gifted children. There are too many possibilities to calculate what their larger goals are, but anyone willing to murder children to achieve them poses a threat to more than just Miwa.

_Whatever you have to do to get the job done, you do it. No matter what happens to me._

It hurts — it hurts more than agreeing to abandon Cassian — but Kay archives the high-priority directive to find and protect Miwa and replaces it with the task of killing as many attackers as possible. He’s been spending too much time with the Jedi not to look at the big picture. Too much time with the children not to care about children in general.

He calculates the best ways to destroy as many enemies as possible, plans a route, and hefts his stolen weapons, ready to protect young Force users he’s never even met.

He has to.

* * *

Kay creeps out to the wide yard right in front of the temple and finds three more attackers standing over the body of the one who’d scarred Zylas.

“It can’t have been Skywalker. Lord Ren took care of him,” one says.

“Well, it wasn’t one of the whelps, either. There aren’t any more alive in the Temple,” says another, and the confirmation sinks into a knot of rage and sorrow in Kay's chest, burning like a hot coal next to his coolant pump.

It also means he can use the heaviest weapon on the field. After he checks the deadman switch, he grips the lightsaber tighter, gauges the distance, and dashes for the wide hangar opening of the temple.

“There!” one of the attackers cries, and then there are several sets of footsteps behind Kay. He’s got a head start and a better knowledge of the building, and they’re following him just like he wants. Just a little farther, and they’ll be inside.

“Fools!” calls a synthetic voice — no, an organic voice fed through a synth — and the men stop before they get to Kay. He freezes behind cover.

“My lord,” one says, “we heard footsteps—”

“Silence! Do you sense another life here? There is no one. We’re done here.”

Kay risks a look. 'Lord Ren' is standing at the edge of the hangar door, not quite far enough in. The others are starting to move back outside.

After a quick calculation, Kay shoots at the nearest attacker. The man changes direction at the last millisecond, though, so the blaster bolt goes wide.

Well, Kay certainly has their attention now.

“I want them alive!”

Already behind different cover, Kay lies in wait. The men are tearing the hangar apart, throwing old crates and empty power cells and pallets of school supplies everywhere with the Force, clearly hoping to flush him out with the chaos.

It won’t work.

He waits. The enemy gets closer and closer, and Kay is ready. When the row of crates next to his own goes flying, he shifts his grip. When his cover is torn aside, he strikes out with the lightsaber, angle and force calculated for the most likely body position of the attacker.

He catches him in the throat. With grim satisfaction, Kay drives the weapon through the man’s trachea and spinal cord, killing him before he hits the floor.

Of course, that leaves Kay in the open, and he doesn’t get a chance to kill another one. An invisible grip snatches him from the ground, drags him several meters, and tears his right arm off, breaking every component in his shoulder in a horrible wrenching screech of metal and tubing. Hydraulic fluid spatters on the stone floor and broken wires threaten to melt more of his synthskin before Kay can shut down all processes for that limb.

And, of course, he no longer has a blaster or lightsaber.

Ren stands before him, hand outstretched and gripping nothing, wearing all black, lightsaber flashing erratically in his other hand.

“A droid? A _droid_ killed three Knights of Ren?!" the synthesized voice says above him, contempt and outrage dripping from the words.

“So far,” Kay says.

His captor steps closer, twisting his raised hand, and in turn the Force twists around Kay, warping his chassis with the strength of it. Only two seconds pass before his components start to fracture, the creaking and snaps unsettling even without pain sensors.

“ _Ever_ ,” the Knight insists. “Now, where’s the list of Force-sensitive children?” he demands.

Kay is surprised to learn that he can feel even more anger and fear. Neither is for himself.

“I’ll be scouring your memory soon enough,” the attacker continues, “but I’ll scrap you quickly if you tell me now.”

“What an attractive offer,” Kay says dryly. His vocabulator, at least, is still operational. “But I’m afraid I must decline.”

Ren growls and rips the clothing and synthskin from Kay’s torso with a gesture. “Give. Me. The list. I know you have it, you malfunctioning irritation.”

Something about the words sets off Kay’s pattern recognition program, and in half a second he’s hit with the realization that he knows that vocal cadence.

Even before Cassian’s initial reprogramming, Kay experienced the same kinds of emotions that organics do; then and now, the main difference is that he can process them much more quickly, if he devotes enough computing cycles to it. So in the time it would take an organic just to cry out in pained disbelief that Ben Solo has murdered all his classmates, Kay lets go of both his shock and the deadman switch.

The remote clinks on the stone floor. ‘Lord Ren’ looks at it, looks back at Kay, turns to leave, but it’s too late. The explosion has already begun before the murdering traitor can order his men out. Ren flings up his arms, trying to shield himself from two million tons of falling stone, and Kay hopes he’s just successful enough to die of a punctured lung or internal hemorrhaging.

Kay himself is unexpectedly still functioning; Ren’s kept him inside the force field. He's going to have to destroy his own core.

From the direction of the other Knights comes a horrible, wet crunch. Ren whips his head to look.

“Four,” Kay says, and he still has enough synthskin on his face to grin viciously.

“You and every last child will suffer!” Ren screams, but he's going to be too late. Kay ignites the white phosphorus capsule in his skull casing.

He loses sensory data in fifty-six milliseconds. Control of his moving parts in eight hundred. Memory files start to go after one thousand twenty.

Peace settles over Kay, and he feels a surprisingly earnest satisfaction that he’s done all he could. At the one thousand, nine hundred and six milliseconds mark, he no longer remembers the names of the children he's protecting, but that's good: they're safe.

It's enough.

At the two thousand, three hundred milliseconds mark — his last tenth of a second — he knows he finally understands Cassian.

* * *

* * *

The main power in the bunker has gone out, but it has an emergency backup that powers the the air circulation system and a single weak light in the ceiling. In the poorly-lit hours that follow the shaking, Kallum and Zylas do their best to care for Arlunia.

Everyone else is dead. Kallum knows it, in their gut, knows that the shuddering earth and darkness and silence can mean only one thing. They haven’t said so out loud. Zylas probably already knows, anyway — he was always good at sensing others’ presence.

Kallum hasn’t said anything about who the attackers were, either, even though the dark silhouette of the shuttle parked on the school’s landing pad made their throat close in terror. Everyone in the First Order feared the Knights of Ren. They bent people's minds, warped reality, and kidnapped or killed with impunity. The only escape was to be beneath their notice.

So, no, Kallum doesn't have the Force, but they don't need it to know everyone is dead.

Zylas has gone from clenched fists and making all the hair on Kallum’s arms stand on end to sitting in a corner and meditating. He might be able to reach someone off-planet; Zylas is good at visions. But even if he weren’t, the meditation also keeps him from punching walls. In a little more than a year Kallum’s already bandaged Zylas’s knuckles several times, so they're content to let him meditate. He might even find someone or something to help.

Arlunia is sleeping; they've all tried to keep the worst of the night away from her, and that she can rest makes Kallum glad.

Glad and alone. No one to talk to. No one to tell them what was happening outside. No one to figure out what they're going to do next.

As a Stormtrooper cadet, KM-5362 had felt alone a lot. Like a good cadet they'd learned to hide it.

Silently, they put Arlunia down in the nest of blankets they’ve made. Only then does Kallum let their breath heave and tears stream down their face without a sound.

Everyone is dead. Kay tried to shield Kallum from the sight of the bodies, but they’d still caught glimpses: Ciel, Elbem, Tanaris, Chichri. Even little Corran, the newest addition to the school and still in diapers. All of them, dead. Master Luke and Miwa both missing. And Kay hasn't come back.

Kay, who saved Kallum twice. Kay, who taught them about choice, and names, and how to stack meditation mats just right so that they’d come sliding down in a mess if the next person who touched them didn’t know the trick. Kay, who pretended he didn’t care for the students as much as if he’d been programmed to.

Kay won’t teach anyone anything ever again.

Now rocking back and forth, Kallum bites their own fist to try to keep from dissolving. It only helps so much, and soon they’re curled in on themselves, tears dripping off their chin and nose.

A hand, warm and surprisingly gentle, comes to rest on Kallum’s shoulder. Kallum hiccups once, wipes their eyes, and sniffs.

“Sorry,” they whisper.

Zylas shakes his head. “It’s okay if you need to. Master Lu—” He chokes, but, determined, swallows and keeps going. “He said our feelings are part of who we are.”

Kallum shudders, leaning into their friend’s touch. Zylas doesn’t move away.

“I don’t want this to be part of me,” Kallum murmurs after a moment.

Zylas lets out a long breath. “Me neither.”

* * *

Over a full day later — after the hours of waiting; after being dug out of the Temple wreckage by Tooesso (as awkward with twelve-year-olds as he is scary to look at); after huddling together at the edge of the forest for several hours while the droid crew combs the area; after Master Luke’s sister arrives, yells at the droids, makes some comm calls, and then escorts the children to another part of the planet — Kallum, Arlunia and Zylas sit around the kitchen table of a farmhouse.

Miz Leia is outside talking to the owner of the house, a human man of about her age. Through the window Kallum watches them with their grave expressions. Miz Leia finishes talking and the man nods. He looks at Kallum, who starts and shrinks back from the window.

“He’s not mad at you,” Zylas says.

Kallum frowns. “I know that,” they snap. They do. It’s just that sometimes something happens that makes them act like they’re back in the First Order. They’ve been doing it a lot more than usual in the last day, and they hate it. Even before the attack they’d only been able to make it happen less often, not stop it completely.

But, Kallum thinks as they slump, that’s not Zylas’s fault. “Sorry.”

Zylas shrugs as if he’s fine. They all know he isn’t, but he’s doing a good job of pretending. Kallum is kind of jealous that he can.

Miz Leia and the man — Mister Dameron — come back inside.

“Zylas, Arlunia, Kallum,” Miz Leia says. “Given that you’ve been living together for a while, I think it’s best that you continue to do so.”

Kallum tries not to sag in relief.

“We think this is a good place for you, at least for now,” Miz Leia continues. “Mister Dameron is Luke’s friend. He’s also a father, so he knows how to take care of you.”

“You have kids, sir?” Kallum asks, skeptical. The house doesn’t have any smaller clothes or toys.

Mister Dameron makes an odd face, then smiles. “I have a son named Poe. He’s all grown up now, though, so he doesn’t live here anymore. He visits sometimes. You’ll probably get to meet him.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

Zylas shifted uncomfortably. “Uh. Master Dameron. Arlunia and I…” He trails off.

“You’re strong in the Force,” Mister Dameron finishes. “I know. I’m not, so I can’t teach you, unfortunately. We’re looking for Master Luke. As soon as we find him, he can teach you again.” He looks at Leia. “I don’t suppose you found any books or holochrons?”

Miz Leia shakes her head. “Not yet. It’s a lot of wreckage to sort through. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

“Thanks,” Mister Dameron says, and then frowns thoughtfully. “The tree might help.”

“Tree?” Zylas says, and gives Kallum a worried look. Kallum doesn’t blame him.

Mister Dameron laughs. “I know it sounds nutty, but here, let me show you,” he says, and takes everyone out back.

The tree is pretty, Kallum thinks, but of course they don’t feel anything. They’re about to decide that Mister Dameron is mildly delusional when they look at Zylas and Arlunia.

Both have a hand on the tree trunk, and both look more peaceful than Kallum thought they could be a day after their lives and family were destroyed. It lifts something from their chest to see it. When they look at Mister Dameron in delighted surprise, he’s smiling gently.

Kallum’s chest tightens, their eyes sting, and then they’re leaning forward against Mister Dameron, crying against his shirt.

The man’s arms are gentle around Kallum.

“I got you, kid,” he says, murmuring. “I got you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Oh, gentle readers. Prepare yourselves for pain. This is the Jedi School Massacre, so it includes: canon-typical violence, barely off-screen child murder, self-defense violence, threats of torture, and character death.

**Author's Note:**

> Demand tissues and blankies from me at [bright-elen](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bright-elen) on Tumblr.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Multiple Variables](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13914624) by [misskatieleigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misskatieleigh/pseuds/misskatieleigh)




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